The Second Order
by sap1066
Summary: He asks her to join him and she says yes, but it swiftly becomes apparent that Ben hasn't thought this through. This is a slow burn romance about whether anyone really can change for love, featuring union disputes, explicit sex and blasters, not necessarily at the same time.
1. Chapter 1

'Join me,' he said, holding out his hand. 'Please.'

The obvious answer, when faced with a homicidal, black obsessed megalomaniac with a nasal twang so pronounced it sounded like he had a womp rat stuck up his nose, was no. Particularly when he'd prefaced his request by asserting that she had no importance to anyone but him and thereby isolating her from any other social connection, readying her for a lifetime of controlling behaviour and emotional abuse. Her answer was going to be no.

And in fact, if he mentioned her parents one more time, it was going to be no, swiftly followed by another lightsaber in the face. But she hesitated, and she wasn't really sure why.

Any sensible female friend or relative would have told her that a dominating bully to everyone else, is not going to be any different with you, just because you happen to sleep in the same bed. Nobody changes for love. But her mother was a filthy junk trader who'd sold her for drinking money and had probably forgotten to give her that advice on the way past.

Rey stood there, just looking at him, at the haunted eyes and hunted expression, at the lips just poised on the edge of a tremble and she wondered. Could she change him? For a couple of minutes there she'd thought she'd succeeded, but if she left him now there was no chance he was coming back to the light. And the way he was looking at her, the hunger written into every line of his body, the need with which he'd breathed his final plea – surely these things meant that he was ready to change, if she asked him to.

She took a quick breath, stepped back a little to break the tension and flapped a hand at him. 'Do you think you could maybe, take your gloves off? That might make this a bit less sinister?'

He took another pace forward, and extended his hand. 'Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as.' Then he paused. 'Oh. Gloves off. You want to do the thing.' He gestured rapidly from her head to his. 'The bridge thing.'

She nodded. 'If you don't mind.'

'Do you think it will still work?' He put the tip of one finger between his teeth and hauled off the heavy moulded leather. 'Snoke said he was doing it just to annoy me.'

'That's not what he said.'

'That's what I heard.' He stuck out his palm. 'Alright, go on then. And then we can rule the galaxy as...'

'Will you stop saying that? We'll hold hands, and I'll see if I can have a vision of the future in which you haven't slaughtered half the known universe. Then I might decide to stay. Possibly.'

He looked affronted. 'Join me, and I promise not to slaughter half the known universe.'

'You'll keep it to a quarter?' She took his hand, but she could tell he thought that he'd already won.

It was instant, this thing between them, instant and powerful and brutally honest. There was nowhere to hide, she could strip him of all his defences with a single thought, leaving him naked and exposed. And he could also read her thoughts, which might be a problem if she continued any further with that analogy.

There were no visions to be had, not this time, only an impression of how strongly he believed in what he'd said. A new start, without all the baggage of the past, something fresh they could create together. She waited a bit, to see if any revelations about his past or his motivation were going to be offered, searching his face for some hint of duplicity.

Obviously, the answer should be no. She didn't want power, or glory, what she wanted mostly was for people to stop shooting at her, and each other. She hadn't chosen any of this, it had chosen her, including it seemed, the man currently returning her stare.

The Sith were dead, the last half a one still dribbling all over the floor, and the Jedi were dead too, or as good as, since Luke wasn't about to leave his island or do anything else useful. The Resistance was gone, reduced to a handful of people whose names she could probably list in under five minutes, the New Republic was gone, and the only power block left was the First Order. His First Order. The one he was offering to change if she stayed.

He hadn't turned to the light, the prospect of power kept him from it, and she had no doubt that if he ascended the throne it would be as Kylo Ren and the galaxy would become a much darker place. Black, most likely, given his usual wardrobe choices.

But not if she stayed. If she stayed, she could change all that, change him, turn him back to the light. Or at least the pale grey. If she left, he'd wipe out the Resistance, and then Luke, and then Rey herself, if she didn't run fast enough or hide well enough. But with her, none of that would happen.

Being brutally honest, the kind of honest he always was, it would take the Resistance at least ten years to rebuild enough to be able to assassinate him. Whereas with her at his side, well, if she couldn't turn him, she could at least kill him.

He swayed closer, so close that if she took a really deep breath she'd be resting on his chest and he gazed into her eyes as if he'd forgotten that anything else existed.

The obvious answer was no. The slightly more devious answer was still probably no. But the connection between them was instant, and powerful and it made her feel like she belonged for the first time in her entire life. Even if the person she belonged with was a homicidal megalomaniac with an obsession for black.

'Ask me again,' she murmured.

He said, 'Join me.'

And the way he said it was so low and hoarse and intimate, that she heard it as something else entirely.

'Yes,' she said.


	2. Chapter 2

Behind her, someone keyed the blast doors open and ran into the throne room, a blur of arms and legs and ginger. 'Supreme Leader,' he yelled. 'Supreme Leader.'

He got just close enough to determine that Snoke was, in fact, doubly dead and then span in her direction, a blaster appearing from beneath his coat.

'You,' he spat. 'The scavenger scum. You did this. And now you will die. Ren, why are you holding her hand?'

Ben dropped it quickly, then raised a finger and jerked the gun out of the man's hand, hurtling it against the wall.

'Rey, he said. 'This is General Hux.'

Another blaster appeared in the man's other hand and he snarled at her. 'You will suffer for what you've done.'

'Me?' She gestured at the brooding, black clad, homicidal megalomaniac next to her. 'Why don't you think it was him who killed Snoke?'

The muzzle of the blaster waved at Ben. 'Because he is scum.' Then it settled on her heart. 'But you are rebel scum.'

She concentrated quickly, succeeded in hauling the weapon out of his hand but failed to monitor its course properly and had to duck as it whizzed towards her face.

'You need to practise that,' remarked Ben in her mind.

She knew it was possible to use the Force to communicate telepathically with anyone with the skills to hear but she'd never actually tried it before. 'Why does he think you wouldn't kill Snoke?' she replied silently.

'Snoke thought I wouldn't kill Snoke. You're shouting, by the way.'

'Sorry. But why do they think that?'

He shrugged, without actually moving. 'I'm known for my fanatical loyalty and devotion.'

'To people who make you kneel, or to anyone?'

'To anyone who deserves it,' he answered.

'Then I should take the blame for Snoke. You'll need the loyalty and devotion of your army if you're going to rule.'

'I don't need their loyalty and devotion.' His contempt was clear. 'I just need their fear.'

'Am I interrupting something?' Hux interrupted, glancing rapidly from one to the other.

Rey stepped forward. 'I killed Snoke.' She called her lightsaber, ignited it and took the next few paces towards Hux at a run, swinging it at his head. 'And I will kill you too, unless you obey me.'

He pulled a third blaster from a back pocket, and this time she didn't hesitate, wrenching it from his hand with the power of her mind. It whistled past Ben's left ear with millimetres to spare and in her head, she heard a disapproving sniff.

'I will never obey you, Jedi scum. ' yelled Hux. 'I am the Supreme Leader.'

He dropped to his knees instantly, clutching at his throat and emitting a collection of phlegmy gagging noises.

'You are not the Supreme Leader.' Ben's voice held a lash of old anger. 'I am the Supreme Leader. And,' there was a brief hesitation. 'She is also the Supreme Leader.'

Rey pivoted, wide eyed. There was an expression on Ben's face which, if she'd had more than two conversations with him that didn't involve threats or shouting, she might have described as embarrassment.

'Join me,' he reminded her quietly. 'And we can rule the galaxy as…'

'Your girlfriend?' Hux was back on his feet again, choking no longer although his eyes still boggled. 'You're putting your girlfriend on the throne?'

'I'm not his girlfriend.' Rey wielded the lightsaber with a touch more menace.

'She's not my girlfriend,' Ben said, at exactly the same time.

Hux frowned. 'Wife?'

'Of course not,' she shot back.

'Concubine?'

'No.' Ben's tone was sharp.

'Sister?'

Rey glanced at Ben. 'Not as far as I know.'

'Whore?' Hux collapsed to his knees again, clutching at this throat.

'Our - ' there was another slight pause, and Rey had the sense that Ben was doing some very quick thinking. 'Relationship is no concern of yours. You will obey her, in the same way that you will obey me. Immediately, and without question.'

The general's face had gone blue, but Ben's had a reddish tinge, and the way he bent forward, with one hand curled in front of him, twisting, led Rey to believe that his attraction to the light side might be wavering. She could feel the threads of his control pulsing though her awareness of the Force and she reached out swiftly, and broke them.

Hux sprawled backwards, and she switched the lightsaber off and knelt by his side. 'My colleague and I have a very straightforward relationship.'

Hux's bloodshot eyes searched hers.

'One of us is always nice, and the other one is always a homicidal megalomaniac.' She gestured with a thumb. 'He's the nice one. Now tell me the location of the rest of the First Order fleet.'

She attempted to pull the information from his mind, then sat back on her heels, considering. 'This is harder than it looks.' She glanced up at Ben. 'You're good at this sort of thing. How does interrogation usually work?'

He folded his arms. 'It's all in the tone of voice. And the lighting. Or you could try this.'

Into her mind came a selection of Force-based interrogation techniques, along with helpful suggestions on how and when they should be used and some case studies to demonstrate efficiency.

She swallowed, stretched out her hand towards Hux and invaded his mind. 'Tell me the location of the rest of the First Order fleet,' she demanded.

'Why do you want to know?' There was a suspicious cast to Ben's tone that she didn't care for and she shot him a warning look.

'Because it makes a change from 'tell me the location of Skywalker' or 'give me the droid' or any of the other things that mad, desperate interrogators usually ask me.'

She straightened, walked back to his side. 'Alright, I've tried fear, and I don't think it works. He's afraid of you, but not afraid enough not to want to kill you. He's tried four times already that I can see, and there's another blaster in a hidden pocket in his coat which he had specifically designed because he thinks you won't spot it. He came here the minute he suspected Snoke was dead to kill you and take charge. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to try loyalty and devotion?'

Ben glared at her, and then at Hux, as if he couldn't decide which one to hit first.

She bent over Hux again. 'Now, General. What's your first name, by the way?'

'No.' Ben grated in her head. 'Call him Hux or pick your favourite expletive and call him that but please don't be nice to him.'

She patted the fallen general's hand instead. 'General. If you attempt to kill me, or, for that matter, my fellow Supreme Leader, I will take this lightsaber, and I will make it do to you, exactly what it did to the old Supreme Leader on the floor over there. But I'd rather we found a less violent way to work together. If you help me, I can promise that he,' she flicked a glance at Ben's rapidly darkening face. 'Will never touch you again.'

She rose, and offered him her hand. 'Now tell me the location of the rest of the First Order fleet.'

Hux reached out, and she helped him up. 'The closest Star Destroyer is less than a parsec away and there are two more at two hundred and then four fifty parsecs out, but we'll need more capacity, because the Supremacy is eight times the size of a Star Destroyer, and the next Dreadnaught is already three months overdue from Kuat.'

Leather creaked as Ben clenched his fists. 'I asked why you want to know. I didn't get an answer.'

She swung to face him with a mild smile. 'Unless I'm much mistaken, the 'rebel scum' have destroyed this ship and it's disintegrating. I was hoping you had another one somewhere without such a big hole in it. Have you given the order to evacuate, General?'

'No. I needed to check with the Supreme Leader before...' His eyes drifted in the direction of Snoke.

'You've checked. Give the order. I doubt there's enough transports for everyone, so you'll need to contact that destroyer and get it to send help. Focus on the people, leave the equipment – we can always get someone to salvage it later, believe me. Now go.'

A calculating light flashed through his eyes before he lowered his head, and clicked his heels. 'Yes, Supreme Leader.'

'Thank you, General.'

He left the room at a quick march, flinging a grin over his shoulder which wasn't meant for Rey.

'Thank you? What do you mean 'thank you'?'

Ben was angry, she could hear that, and feel it, coming at her in waves across the room, but he wasn't breaking things and he hadn't reached for a weapon, so she shrugged. 'I thought I'd do things my way.'

'Your way involves destroying my authority.'

'No. It involves offering you an alternative to your way. Isn't that what you wanted me here for?' She followed Hux towards the exit. 'Shouldn't we be leaving?'

He called her back. 'You take the Supreme Leader's escape shuttle. It's just behind the throne, the controls are easy enough to operate.'

Annoyance spiked at his assumption about her piloting skills, but she pushed it aside. 'Aren't you coming?'

'It only seats one. There's only supposed to be a single Supreme Leader. You're something new.' She nearly smiled at that.

'My ship is much faster anyway. Don't stray too far from the rest of the fighters and don't answer any communications until I've made an announcement that you've joined us. I don't want you shot down before we've even started.'

That was probably his way of saying a fond farewell, Rey reflected, as she strapped herself into Snoke's vacant chair. The controls were indeed easy to operate, in fact, all she'd have to do was press the 'on' button and the ship would fly itself, since all its functions were set in slave mode to a command shuttle, wherever that was.

She fingered the communications switch as the ship took off. What would he say in this 'announcement?' How would he explain their relationship to an audience of millions, if she couldn't even explain it to herself? She toggled the button, opening a channel to the ship that hers was tied to following.

He acknowledged immediately.

'What was the end of the sentence, Ben - I kept cutting you off? You said, join me, and we can rule the galaxy as – as what?'

'I would have thought that was obvious by now. You've got an inordinate amount to learn. Join me, and we can rule the galaxy as master and apprentice.'

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	3. Chapter 3

Rey gaped at the speaker but all it could offer was a small snick and the hiss of distance. Apprentice? Apprentice? That was what he wanted her to join him for - so he could have her permanently on her knees being shouted at? He was planning on relaxing on the throne while she skivvied around doing the dirty work, exactly as he had done for Snoke.

She hit herself on the forehead with the heel of her palm. How had she fallen for all the lies he'd spun – all that 'let the past die' and the world with no Sith? How could she have been so stupid? Because she'd held his hand – that was why. Because back on Ahch-To she'd sat across a fire and looked into his eyes and she'd felt something – a connection, an understanding, something more even. She thought he'd felt it too.

When he'd said, 'join me, please,' his voice had cracked, and she'd thought his heart had cracked with it. But now she realised that simply wasn't the case. He had no intention of changing for her, he was the same man he'd always been. And that man was Kylo Ren.

As if she'd conjured him his hologram appeared on the comms panel in front of her, complete with mask and cowl, and when he spoke it was obvious he'd turned the voice modifier setting in his helmet from 'scary' to 'downright terrifying'.

'You know me,' he said, and she'd forgotten how alien he sounded, the creature in the mask.

'Today the Resistance has destroyed the Supremacy, and assassinated Supreme Leader Snoke. It is a black day for the First Order. But you know me, and you know I will not let this go unpunished.'

He wasn't talking to her, not specifically, this must be the announcement he'd mentioned, his way of rallying the troops after a heavy defeat, broadcasting on all frequencies to the hordes of acolytes currently abandoning ship. The space around her shuttle was thick with them.

'I have assumed command as Supreme Leader. General Hux remains in post. Other appointments will be confirmed when an inventory has been taken of our losses. We are joined by a new senior appointment, Rey of the Jedi, who has defected from the Resistance today.'

She was horrified to see a three-dimensional image of herself replacing Kylo Ren's pitted mask. It must have been taken aboard the Supremacy, but someone had been playing with the picture – her clothes were no longer white and beige, for example, they had been recoloured to appear black, and the natural brown of her hair was re-tinted several shades darker. Her cheekbones were never that prominent, outlined in dark shadows, and the menacing glint in her eye wasn't something that had ever appeared in a mirror.

She put her head in her hands, 'What have I done?'

Kylo wasn't finished though. 'She speaks with the authority of the Supreme Leader and is to be obeyed as you would obey me.' His visage appeared on the hologram again, in all its shiny glory.

'The Reaper is on its way to pick up survivors from the Supremacy, but in the meantime, we will regroup on Crait, where we will find the remains of the Resistance and take vengeance for our fallen comrades. You know me, as I know you. Together, we will not fail.'

The picture winked out and the control panel lit up in brilliant blinking lights as the computer received co-ordinates along with the message. Beside her ship the whole phalanx began to turn towards the planet.

Rey banged her hand on the metal, hard enough to hurt. This was her fault, she should have struck him down when she had the chance, just ignored the 'please' and the begging eyes, picked up her lightsaber and smashed it in his face. Now she was flying into battle on the wrong side because of the mistakes she'd made.

It wasn't too late though, there was still something she could do, although she was effectively a prisoner in a flying gaol. He'd underestimated her abilities as a pilot, and he'd left her a ship, and that was going to be his downfall – all she had to do was override the controls, locate the guns and blast his shuttle out of the sky, or failing that, ram it and take him down with her. Either way, neither of them was getting out of this alive.

She gritted her teeth, kicked off the underside of the control panel and started fiddling with the wires.

His voice hissed though the speaker a couple of minutes later. 'What are you doing? Your shuttle is sending me malfunction messages.'

'I'm so terribly sorry, oh my lord and master. Pray forgive your unworthy apprentice. I must have pushed the wrong button. Just ignore me.'

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then one by one, the panels around her began to go dark.

'I'm shutting down the power to the weapons systems, primary and secondary, long range communications, navigation, as well as both propulsion drives and the standby power cell. I'll tow you in. We can talk about this later.'

She slammed both hands against the floor, watched as a sleek black ship manoeuvred into place in front of her. Now he was right where she wanted him, she just had to figure out a way to get the blasters back up without him noticing. Unless…

She thought hard for a minute. Unless there was another way to do this that wasn't quite so …well… Resistance. Something that was maybe a little bit more Supreme Leader.

He'd left her with short range comms, and perhaps that was enough. She toggled the switch to send, using the same channel as the broadcast message, happy to send out a signal to as many of the fleet as possible.

'This is Rey of the First Order, I speak with the authority of the Supreme Leader. My comms channel is malfunctioning, could someone please patch me through to General Hux.'

Hux popped up on her holoscreen almost before she'd finished speaking, so keen were the rest of the army to obey their black clad commandant.

'Hello General. Is this a secure line?'

'Yes, Supreme Leader.'

'Excellent. I take it we're in the process of attacking the rebel base on Crait – how long until we're in range?'

'We'll be landing in around half an hour. It will take another two to prepare the ground forces and travel to their exact location.'

'Thank you. And do you know how many rebels there are on Crait?'

'Our estimates are around forty-six, Supreme Leader.'

'Forty-six battalions, or forty-six people?'

'The latter, Supreme Leader.'

'And how many are there of us?'

'Two hundred and twenty-six thousand, four hundred and forty, Supreme Leader.'

'I see. Then the rebels on Crait must be very important, or have something of value for us to be wasting our resources on them. Which is it?'

'I don't know, Supreme Leader.'

'Can you find out? I know you have an intelligence service. Can I speak to whoever heads it up?'

'Connecting you now, Supreme Leader.'

Another face appeared on the holoscreen, a more elderly man with a craggy mien, and a shock of bright white hair, sticking up directly from his skull like frozen smoke.

She gave him a friendly smile. 'Hello, I'm Rey. And you are?'

'Captain Ocram.' The man nodded back, but his caution was clear. Next to him on the comms pad, Ben's image also popped up, still covered by the ridiculous mask.

She ignored him. 'Captain Ocram. Apart from General Organa, who are the current leaders of the Resistance?'

He named around ten individuals, two of whom she'd never heard of, and the rest were dead. She pointed this out. 'None of these people are currently active. What transport do they have?'

'A cruiser.'

'Destroyed.'

'Bombers.'

'Destroyed.'

'A medical frigate.'

'Also destroyed.'

'Ten ageing X wings fighters.'

'I think you got eight of them, according to your records.'

'A couple of transports.'

'Fair enough, we'll give them that. What resources do they have that we need? Any secret weapons? Important plans? Missing bits of maps?'

'None, as far as I know.'

She thought Captain Ocram could probably tell where she was going by the small smile he gave her.

'Then why are we sending two hundred and twenty-six thousand, four hundred and forty personnel, along with all their associated armour, transportation and weapons to attack forty-six people who have nothing of value to us whatsoever?'

'Because they are the Resistance,' chipped in General Hux, 'And we must wipe them out.'

She leaned back in her chair. 'They aren't though, are they? They're no threat to you. They can't resist you in any practical sense. All they are is a name. A hope. A legend. Can you kill a legend, General Hux? Can you blow it up? Can you shoot it dead?'

'Of course not.' He looked flustered by the question.

'Captain Ocram, how many other insurgencies are there currently underway among the systems controlled by the First Order?'

'Five hundred and thirty-one.'

'Five hundred and thirty-one rebellions? Five hundred and thirty-one different resistance groups? And how may of them have more than forty-six members, Captain Ocram?'

'All, Supreme Leader.' He was openly grinning at her now.

'Then why is the one on the planet below so important? Aside from the personal grudge that some of us might have against it, of course. Why is it important?'

There was complete silence on the comms channel. She leaned forward again.

'Because you're making it important. You, the First Order, are giving it the only real importance it has. There are forty-six people down on that planet and how many more are coming? Want to know the answer? None. The only thing that works on this ship is the communications system and I can see that they've been sending out messages, but no one is answering. They have no support. They're an irrelevance. So, treat them like that. Treat them like all the other five hundred and thirty-one other rebellions that you've got going on. But whatever you do, don't go down to that planet, all guns blazing and let them become the rag tag band of freedom fighters who all died heroically for their cause. Don't help them create a legend. No one wants to join a rebellion with forty-six people, no resources and no support, but everyone loves a legend.'

'But,' Hux said weakly. 'If we don't destroy them now they will regroup, and come back stronger, and we've already lost two Dreadnaughts in the past month.'

She sighed. 'Captain Ocram. You have a means of tracking General Organa, I assume? She's the only leader they have left.'

He replied with an encouraging nod. 'Of course, and if they do regroup I'll know where they are, and we can destroy them more easily. Kill her, and I won't know who to track.'

Rey nodded. 'Perfect. Do you still want to attack the forty-six rebels on Crait, Supreme Leader?'

Ben's image winked out.

'I'll take that as a no. General – I suggest you send a small detachment to clear the rebel base. Don't make a big fuss about it. And make sure General Organa gets away. Then spend your time and effort planning how to rebuild those Dreadnaughts, not chasing shadows. '

'Thank you, Supreme Leader.' He actually sounded grateful.

'Could you come and see me tomorrow please Captain Ocram? I'd like to discuss your five hundred rebellions.'

'Yes ma'am.'

And that, thought Rey, contentedly, was how the save the Resistance from the inside.

But just to make sure she closed her eyes and tried the use the Force to connect telepathically with the one person she was sure had the skills to hear.

'Leia,' she said. 'They are coming. You have two hours to escape. Call the Falcon, it's still nearby. They have next to no intelligence about anyone apart from you, so make sure you're visible, and everyone else can get on with rebuilding. Good luck.'

In her head Ben said, 'You're shouting again.'


	4. Chapter 4

Rey never made it to Crait. Her shuttle was kept in orbit around the planet for the next three days, while various Star Destroyers arrived, picked up passengers from the surface or the remains of the circling fleet and left.

There was very little to do aboard Snoke's shuttle. He'd had a stash of Corellian brandy she'd tasted, and then poured away, and an extensive collection of interrogation devices, all of which looked like they'd been used, which she happily pushed out of the airlock. There were some actual paper based books, all of which had to do with either torture techniques or training Sith apprentices and contained almost exactly the same set of instructions, so those made a nice fire one evening, not long after she'd finished the brandy.

On the first day she monitored the communications channel religiously, glued to every garbled message and relayed instruction. It appeared that Kylo Ren had personally supervised the expedition to the rebel base, around an hour after she'd sent her message to Leia, but it had been found empty, already abandoned and he'd blasted it to smithereens anyway. Rey divined by this, that he might not be in the best of moods.

She'd never had a response to her telepathic message, and she had no way of knowing whether it had even got through, but Chewie would have been monitoring transmissions the same way she had, and it was a reasonable hypothesis that he was the reason they'd escaped. That also meant that all her friends knew she had been on the First Order ship when it exploded, and, if her message hadn't been received, would by now assume she was dead.

No one was coming to save her. No one even knew she was in trouble.

The shuttle continued to go around, and around and around, as she awaited the leisure of Kylo Ren. She thought a lot about killing him. She imagined it so much she found herself waking in the morning drenched in sweat, hands shaking with the effort of a night of throttling dreams. It wasn't just him she was going to kill though, she'd fantasised about running a lightsaber through his guts many times since he'd murdered his father - it was Ben Solo she was really after. The man behind the monster, the one who had lied to her and made her believe him. He'd woken something on Ahch-To that had nothing to so with unseen cosmic forces of right and wrong, and everything to do with a lonely girl, and the feeling of belonging. His death was personal.

The shuttle databanks unexpectedly switched back on on the second day, and she paged through the information they contained for want of anything else to do, but with increasing interest as time went on. She learned about the history of the First Order, slow build and steady rise, and the steps that had been necessary to achieve it.

When Captain Ocram called her on the morning of the third day she had more questions than she knew what to do with.

'But what's it for? Ultimately, I mean, what's the point of it?'

The Captain's hologram put up its feet on its desk, and sipped from the hot drink it had needed, after talking for so many hours. 'A very good question, young lady. But not one I know the answer to. I simply collect the data and let them make of it what they will.'

'But don't you care what happens?'

'Not really. It's a game. There are pieces all over the board, some light, some dark. They both want to win, and they'll both do anything to achieve it. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other, but I don't think it's for anything. I don't think the power has a purpose - Republic, First Order, they're both the same. My advice to you, is focus on the detail and let the big picture take care of itself.'

She flicked at a piece of loose webbing on the chair. 'I'm not sure Supreme Leaders can do that,' she said, gloomily.

He shrugged. 'I've met a lot of Supreme Leaders. Like I explained, a career as long as mine, a life as long as mine and you see them all come and go. Palpatine, Snoke, senior Senators and respected Republicans. You're the only one who's ever wanted to talk to me about the point of power. If you don't want it, leave it alone, same as anything. Now I've got informants beating down my door to tell me all about the latest crisis in the Telanian system, so if there isn't anything else I can do for you today, I do need to go.'

'No, she sighed. 'Just send me over the files you promised.'

'There are five hundred and thirty-one of them.'

'That's alright, I have a lot of time of my hands. And Menan, if you're ever passing wherever it is I'm going, it would be nice to meet in person.'

He bowed his head. 'The pleasure is all mine, Rey.'

She'd managed to get through half the files before the ship's docking sequence abruptly commenced, and she had to go and check her lightsaber, for about the thousandth time. She was the last to arrive. No other ships accompanied hers into the hangar, none were stationed on its floor; there was no sign of the hustle and bustle of troops and droids and whatever else milling around as there had been the last time she'd landed on a First Order craft.

The touchdown was gentle, and the doors slid open with a tiny snick, releasing cool air into the stale smelling ship. She had her weapon activated even before she'd made it down the ramp. This wasn't a normal landing – no craft this size could be this empty on a normal day. The hangar had been cleared.

She was conscious of gun turrets swivelling to track her as she moved away from the ship, very small and alone against the unseen ranks of the enemy.

She felt him then, close by. The Force stretched around her in all directions, flat and calm like an ocean without wind, except one small part of it that swirled and frothed, boiling the sea. There, to her right, somewhere beyond an enormous opening in the blank grey wall, hiding in the dark. She swished her weapon a few times, because she knew he'd sense her the same way she felt him, and she wanted him to hear it, and be scared.

She paused with her foot just over the threshold, peering into the black. Red fire split the shadow, burning across the blank eyeholes of the mask. She said nothing, preferring not to waste energy on greetings or threats. Instead, she ran to attack.

The door slammed shut as soon as she'd entered, muted lighting set into the walls and floor flicking on. Apart from the thing she'd come to face, the room was empty, the walls smooth and featureless, the ceiling very far away.

He parried her first blow, dodged the second, threw her against the wall with a Force push so hard she saw stars. She gritted her teeth, and charged.

He wasn't quite as easy to kill as she'd been expecting though. After an hours' worth of feint and lunge, side swipe and overhead smash, elbow to the face and kick in the ribs, he failed to be dead and she was getting tired.

There just wasn't anything else in the room to play with. The walls resisted any attempt to rip bits off and throw them at his head, the floor was smooth and impossible to trip on, no hills gave an advantage or trees a distraction. There was nothing but him and her, two lightsabers and an awful lot of running around.

Shortly afterwards she thought she had him when he retreated into a corner, switching his weapon from hand to hand as he removed the helmet, threw it to the floor and shucked off his cape. Once removed, his face held no more expression than the mask, watching her circle with cold, dead eyes.

Half an hour later, sick of rubbing sweat off her palms she used her teeth to remove her sleeves, unwound the sheet of linen that had been so useful in the desert, and was less so in a fight to the death.

Two hours after that, her fingers almost too numb to grasp the hilt, her legs shaking with effort, and her hair sweat-stuck to her head she thought she had him again when the red blade dipped, and he hit a panel in the wall with his elbow.

It sprang open behind him, revealing a row of water cannisters and some towels. He lobbed a bottle over for her to catch, still keeping a safe distance and she gulped it down, watching warily from the corner of her eye.

She discarded the bottle and continued to circle, looking for an opening.

He matched her, move for move, breaking the long succession of grunts and yells that had been the only communication up to now with: 'I always liked training. I miss it.'

She didn't answer, hoping conversation would make him careless.

'Jedi training begins at birth, earlier if they can manage it. I was seven before my mother managed to convince my father to let Luke teach me. From then on, training was my life. I only got home once every couple of months or so, and even then, my mother had trouble making time to see me. I'd forgotten what my father looked like by the time I was eight.'

She probed his defences with the lightsaber, without commenting.

'Jedi training has a technical component – you're supposed to sit around thinking about how superior you are a lot. The rest is drills. First positions. Attacking as a team. Lightsaber technique, that sort of thing.'

With a sudden burst of energy, he took a couple of steps and cartwheeled off a side wall, smashing at her head as he flew though the air with such force she had trouble staving him off.

He landed, breathing hard. 'Sith training is more personalised, as you'd expect. Tends to be test based. Kill your enemy to test your character, kill your friend, even more of a test. Kill your father, biggest test of all.'

The dull light reflecting in his eyes distracted her and he launched himself in her direction with a lunge that left her reeling.

'There may be others, but as far as I know, I'm the only person still alive who's had Jedi training. Never finished it, and not just because my uncle tried to murder me. He always said I'd know when I didn't need any more lessons, but I never did. And you, you're strong but…'

He whipped past her on a spin, kicked the back of her knee in passing and she went down with a howl.

'You need training. Jedi, Sith, both, whatever. We can try something different if you want, but if you don't learn how, you're never going to be able to kill me.'

She got back up, wincing, but he had more to say.

'I realise that suggesting you become my apprentice wasn't very flattering and I'll remember that. You like flattery.'

She hobbled after him, unable to do much more than waggle the sword threateningly.

'But I was trying to give you what you want. You need training. Luke won't do it. I will.'

He came closer, but still out of range, and with a flourish, extinguished the sword and clipped it back on his belt.

'I'm not trying to turn you Rey,' he said quietly. 'I'm trying to love you.'

My romance novels, The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available on Amazon, if you're interested.


	5. Chapter 5

He was gone before she could process what he meant, and she slipped to the floor, breathing hard, wiping sweat off her forehead with an equally sweaty forearm. She was seriously in need of a shower, which was going to present a challenge, since she didn't actually have a room to put a shower in. She towelled off as much of the damage as she could with the contents of the drawer he'd shown her, and then hopped out into the corridor, longing for her staff.

Life had returned to the Star Destroyer in response to some secret signal or other and she was caught up in a fast-moving stream of busy people hurrying one way or another as if their lives depended on it, which it was possible that they did. No one, but no one, would catch her eye, although she was sure they all knew who she was. She was the only person not in uniform for a start, and one of the very few not in black.

She hailed a passing droid, sure that its facial recognition programme meant that she wouldn't have to go through some painful process of introduction. 'Could you show me where my room is, please?'

'This way, Supreme Leader.'

She was still in post then, despite spending three days in prison and trying her very best to kill the real Supreme Leader. The droid led her to a lift somewhat off the main flow, which she didn't have to share with anyone and went to only one floor. It disgorged her into a corridor so shiny it must have needed waxing every hour and she pressed her hand onto a burnished black wall, just to see if the imprint would still be there when she next went past.

'Who cleans this?' she asked.

'Service personnel.'

The droid indicated a set of double ebony doors with obsidian trim set into a jet wall. The First Order were very committed to their colour scheme.

'Not droids then?'

'No, Supreme Leader.' The droid bowed slightly, and headed off.

The doors unlocked readily to her fingerprint. 'One more thing.' She poked her head back into the corridor. 'Where is the other Supreme Leader's room?'

The droid pointed a finger at the next door along.

'Of course it is.'

She'd been given a suite, not a room, which opened directly into an office, dominated by a massive desk, which was itself dominated by the even more massive First Order insignia hanging on the wall. She frowned at it briefly, before reaching out remotely and tearing it down. The next room along was a lounge, containing several banks of screens, a full size holopad for all the urgent shouting at subordinates she'd have to do, and an entire wall full of motivational material for the First Order, which would need to find the incinerator in short order. The bedroom came next, the bed approximately as large as Jakku, and refreshingly, not black.

But she couldn't spend any time on it, because the bathroom was calling and, after too much time trying to work out what the various knobs and buttons were for, she was finally able to wash the fight away.

There was no question of putting her stained clothing back on again afterwards so she headed for the wardrobe to see what final horrors it held in store. Someone had thoughtfully provided a wide range of replacement raiment, all in her size and all, inevitably, in black. There were uniforms of various styles and descriptions, a couple of long tunics, baggy trousers, tight pants, something made completely of leather and right at the back, the last and most appalling depravity. A dress. A high necked, long sleeved dress with an integral hood, to be worn with a thick leather belt, its full skirts slashed to mid-thigh with high black boots neatly paired beneath. She suspected that if she really dug around in the back of the closet she'd find the matching helmet.

Sighing heavily, she returned to the bathroom and began scrubbing at her old clothes, although when she'd finished, even they looked a lot greyer than before. She wrapped herself in a robe, drifted back into the office and spent a while exploring the terms of her captivity.

She'd realised from the time the databanks on the shuttle had unaccountably started working that there was no chance of escape. She had read only access to the First Order military archives, command structure, construction schedules, troop deployments, credit records, purchasing datasets and everyone everywhere had been told to tell her anything she wanted. But she couldn't leave. Her access didn't extend to any form of transport, she was banned from all meetings of the military elite and her access codes wouldn't work the long-range communications array. This was a much bigger ship, but she was still a prisoner.

Added to that, the man who owned the room next door, the man she was struggling not to think about, knew she was trying to help the Resistance and knew she wanted to kill him. Despite 'join me' and the thing he'd said to her at the end of the fight, which she was also struggling not to think about, he wasn't going to let her go. She would have to find her own way out.

In the meantime… She pushed a button on the desk, and, because it was that sort of desk, a lackey on the other end answered immediately. 'Yes, sir.'

'Call me Rey. There were some files on my shuttle I didn't finish reading, could you have them transferred over please? And could you find me a needle and thread?'

'Of course, Supreme Leader.'

'Thank you…?'

'Myakka, Supreme Leader.'

'Thank you, Myakka.'

She opened the door a few minutes later to a young man with a virulent skin condition, who shifted on the spot as if he'd forgotten to go to the toilet.

'Hi,' he started brightly, and from then on degenerated into gabbling. 'That is, I mean, good evening Supreme Leader, sir. Ma'am. Supreme Leader. I didn't mean to say hi, it just came out and I've forgotten the salute. I always forget the salute, don't kill me for it, I'm not important enough.' He took a breath. 'I'm the tailor you sent for.'

'I didn't really send for a tailor, I can sew perfectly well myself.'

The boy gave her a sceptical look. 'They made me watch a film about you. If you made the clothes you were wearing in it then I doubt you know what a needle is.'

She opened her door and let him in.

'My name is Haight, Supreme Leader.' He bobbed a bow at her.

'I'm Rey and I'm only going to kill you if I catch you bowing to me, Haight.' She eyed the wardrobe balefully. 'I'd like you to make me something to wear that isn't black.'

He beamed at her.

A couple of hours later she was standing on her office desk, arguing.

'I'm telling you, you should wear it. You can really carry it off.'

'It's too long, it'll get caught under my boots.'

'Give me some credit. It's a fraction above the floor, it won't get caught and everyone who is anyone around here wears a cloak.'

Haight had made her an outfit as close as possible to the one still drying in the bathroom, although he hadn't been able to replicate the sleeves and he'd had to make use of the wide leather belt from the closet to stop it bagging at the waist.

He held out a hand and helped her down. 'There, all done. You look amazing.'

She eyed herself in the mirror. The top was a little bit more low cut than she'd been hoping for, the trousers a little bit too tight but she could move in it and she even had a useful hook on the belt to hang her lightsaber.

'Well,' Haight began packing away his tools. 'That's the most fun I've had here in a long time.'

She swished the cloak a bit, still unsure. 'Don't you like working here?'

He snorted. 'Like it? I don't have a choice, of course I don't like it.'

Her hand flashed to her mouth. 'You're not a slave, are you? I'm so sorry, I should have asked. I would have made this myself rather than let you do it.'

'I'm not a slave, I get paid, but I'd rather not work for the army.' He flicked at his uniform in distaste. 'The quality isn't what it was. I was transferred here because there are such problems with the clothing manufacturers on Bak'Sharat. The First Order is running short of uniforms and they're having to employ people like me who can make them from scratch, so the generals don't have to wander round in their underwear.'

'What's the problem on Bak'Sharat?' Rey named a planet she'd never so much as heard of.

'You should talk to my friend Janeek, he's from there, he'll tell you all about it.'

'Is he a tailor?'

'No, he's your cleaner.'

Her desk, because it was that sort of a desk, contained a copious amount of Corellian brandy, most of which Janeek had polished off, by the time Rey managed to manoeuvre him round to uniforms.

'My mum says it's awful in the factories at the moment. She's had a stormtrooper at the end of her bench every day just to make sure she keeps working. Right nasty one he is too. Followed her into the loo yesterday.'

'Why is a stormtrooper in a factory?' Rey wondered. 'Doesn't sound very dangerous.'

Janeek pursed his lips. 'You've never met the labour unions of Bak'Sharat. The First Order pay everyone in this.' He dug in his pocket and flipped over a coin, with a familiar logo on both sides.

'It's a credit,' Rey shrugged.

'No, it's a First Order credit. It's worth about the same as half a real one. When you work for them you get free board and lodging, but they only pay you in these things. And you can only spend their money on worlds controlled by the First Order as well. That was fine when an Order credit was worth the same as a proper one, but they keep issuing more and more, and now they're trying to pay their suppliers in this junk as well. The unions won't have it. A fair day's work for a fair day's pay they say, not half of it with a pretty picture on the side. They won't make the products if the Order doesn't pay, and it prefers to try to bully then instead, which is why my mum has to put with JK4785 or whatever he calls himself.'

Rey shook her head. 'I don't know much about trade disputes, I'm afraid.'

'It isn't just a trade dispute any more. The Bak'Sharat unions have been onto the ones in in the Telanian system, them who make the weapons and they've linked up. Planning a grand strike, they are. It'll be huge. I can't wait to see the First Order generals marching around without their blasters and their pants.'

'I know someone who knows about the Telanian system,' she mused. 'Maybe I'll ask him.'

She placed the call the moment they'd left, a little disconcerted to have a full-size Captain Ocram standing in her lounge wearing only his pyjamas.

'What keeps you up so late, young lady?' he asked, with a wrinkled smile. 'I'm too tired to talk about the ethics of power this evening.'

'Can you take me to Telanian system? I want to talk to the unions.'

His smile faded a little. 'That might be tricky. I'm allowed to talk to you, but there are orders confining you to The Reaper. You're not allowed to travel.'

'Could you at least ask? I'll see what I can do from here.'

He yawned. 'In the morning.'

If she could get off the ship there was a chance she'd be able to escape, join the Telanian rebels or at the very least persuade them to get a message to the Resistance and ask for help. But first, she'd have to get someone to change the orders, and the best place to start was with the man who had issued them.

Early the next morning she found her way back to the side room off the hangar, and waited until he sensed where she was and came looking. The mask was back; he seemed to be needing it more these days. His hand hovered over the handle of his weapon.

She took a deep breath, and reminded herself sternly that she was only doing this, so she could escape, or kill him, whichever came first, and she said. 'Train me. Please.'

He pressed the catches on either side of the helmet, took it off, squinted at her. 'Are you wearing a sheet?'

I can't post on Monday so I'm putting this up now - next chapter on Friday, as usual. We're going to be spending some time aboard The Reaper - a name I'd finished writing about before I realised it had already been used, so for the purists among you, think of this ship as The Reaper 2.


	6. Chapter 6

'What happened to flattery?'

He considered that for a minute. 'Nice cloak. That's the best I can do. What kind of training did you have in mind?'

'I want to do everything you can do.'

He shrugged, but she had the impression he was disappointed.

'Four basic starting positions.' He demonstrated. 'Fifteen combinations.' He moved through each one with the ease of long familiarity and she strove to repeat what he'd done.

'No, keep your balance forward.'

'No, elbows are lower.'

'Balance forward, or I'm going to do this again.' He made to kick the back of her knee, but she twisted away, pivoting into the next position.

'Better. Now faster.'

She had little concentration left for anything else as she mastered the steps, whirling the lightsaber round in a series of graceful arcs. Then a rock hit her on the arm and she broke off to grab at it with an exclamation. Five others followed in quick succession before she reacted quickly enough to block one.

'What are you doing?'

He had another twenty or so suspended in the air around him. 'Carry on with the drill, and use the Force to stop yourself getting hit.'

It sounded easy, but it took a long time before she was able to dance through the complex routine and maintain enough spatial awareness to repel the missiles hurtling at her from all sides.

She called for a break eventually, taking a drink out of the cabinet. 'This is combat practice isn't it – in case I get into a fight and someone else is shooting at me.'

He pulled open the next drawer along and retrieved a blaster pistol.

'We can move on to combat practice if you think you're ready. This is a specially designed Jedi training blaster, I'm going to fire it at you and I want you to stop the bolt before it hits. It's not going to kill you, but it might sting a bit.' He turned it round and handed her the stock. 'You shoot it at me first, and I'll demonstrate.'

She took careful aim, and then shot him in the face. The charge didn't connect, just stayed suspended in the air for a few seconds, long enough to give him time to dodge out of the way.

'Impressive. Alright, I'll have a go.'

The first blast caught her on the arm, glancing across her flesh too fast to stop and leaving a blistered trail in its wake. She yelled out in pain. 'Stop. You actually shot me.'

The second shot grazed her right thigh, punched a big hole through the cloak and buried itself in the back wall. 'Stop it. There's something wrong with the blaster. That's live fire.'

The third shot just clipped her neck and she could smell her hair smouldering. 'Stop it,' she shouted, advancing towards him, anger rising swiftly with the pain.

He shot her again, her shoulder this time, a glancing blow but enough to burn. His face was impassive, unmoved, and she knew he'd hurt her all day if he had to. 'Stop it, stop it, stop it.'

She was ablaze with fury, wanting nothing more than to snatch the gun back and turn it on him. She sensed his finger tightening on the trigger and she focused on the shot, paused it just beyond the barrel, ducking underneath so she could yell into his face.

'I said, stop it.'

She snatched the gun out of his grip, checked it over. 'This is an ordinary blaster. There's no training setting.' She shook it at him. 'I don't believe the Jedi shot their apprentices without warning. What are you doing?'

He rolled a shoulder. 'That was a bit more dark side. Do you see how much more quickly you learn if you hate me? I know you hate me.' He paused for a second. 'Why did you come back?'

'Because you won't let me leave the ship. I don't have anywhere else to go.'

'Not now. After the fireplace when you held my hand. Why did you come and find me?' He scanned her face with sharp, darting movements of those dark, dark eyes, searching for something hidden.

'To turn you away from the dark side.'

That was the obvious answer. It was the one she'd given Luke. It was the one she wanted to believe.

He inclined his head a fraction, considering, and in that sing-song voice he used when he was trying to be particularly menacing he said, 'No, that's not it.'

This close up, close, but not touching, the intensity of his attention disturbed her on some profound level. Whether or not you liked him, at this range he was utterly compelling. His eyes drew her in, the secrets behind them, the pain they hid. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, her every conscious thought telling her to stay away from the fall, a flash of temptation in her heart to do it anyway. The first, electric second became a moment, stretched into a minute, longer, before she lost track, watching him watch her, wondering what would happen next.

She could see where the edges of the scar had knitted together, the parts that would never heal, the evidence of older damage wrought in odd patches across his skin.

She thought about kissing him.

She looked at his lips and the thought was there in her head so quickly it shocked her.

'That's what I thought,' he said and left her standing there with her cheeks flaming, disgusted with herself.


	7. Chapter 7

It took a few days for Captain Ocram to contact her again, time which she spent chatting to Haight and Janeek and drinking tea with Adjutant Myakka in her office, under pretext of learning about the daily routine on the ship. She'd found a room set aside for physical recreation in her quarters and she spent a lot of time running, keeping well away from the hangar bay and the memory of Kylo Ren.

She'd put it down to the fact that she was a prisoner, in the end. There was some kind of attraction that went on when people had been captive too long, where they ended up empathising with their guards for want of any other emotional outlet. She needed to escape, that was all. And in any case, he was a monster, not a man. All the other men she'd ever been attracted to had been nice, not homicidal megalomaniacs. The black did suit him though.

She'd already read the five hundred odd rebellion files twice when a flashing light alerted her to a holographic call.

'I couldn't get you to Telania,' Captain Ocram announced. 'I only got Duuk.'

'Oh.' It was a small moon, known for the quality and quantity of its markets and it had only merited a couple of lines in the files. Any resistance movement there was going to be small, and difficult to find, making it all the more likely that Rey was going to need to steal a vessel in order to get away. That was going to be far easier to accomplish if she could manage to convince Captain Ocram to take her in a fighter, or a small cruiser with hyperdrive capability would be ideal. She was sure she could overpower him without him minding too much.

'We're scheduled to arrive this afternoon. Apparently, there are some arrangements that need to be made first. I'm to meet you on the surface when The Reaper arrives. They're taking you shopping in a Star Destroyer.'

Rey's mouth hung open until he'd disconnected. She was going to be allowed off the ship, that concession had been won in the training hangar, she was sure, but the chances of her escaping from the clutches of the First Order were remote, if the Order itself was going to come with her.

She flung on her old clothes, paced around her office until Myakka called to escort her down to the hangar bay. There was a guard of honour in it - hundreds of stormtroopers lined up in ranks prepared to greet her arrival, or repulse a surprise Resistance attack, no doubt.

She was ushered into the same dual winged shuttle that had towed her towards Crait but although she was braced for another tense encounter, the pilot was simply a different man in a mask.

It was a short hop to the surface, and Menan Ocram met her on the landing pad with a mock salute and a welcoming smile. He was much taller than his hologram had led her to expect, and appeared significantly more frail in the flesh.

'Supreme Leader,' he announced with a flourish. 'Allow me to present the Chief Haggler of Duuk, his Excellency Mimrod the Third.'

The little green man beside him bobbed into a deep bow. He was wearing the most brightly coloured riot of colours she'd seen in at least a week and she liked him on sight.

'It's always a pleasure to meet the Supreme Leader,' he crooned, plausibly enough that anyone else might have thought he meant it.

'I wouldn't get too excited,' she replied, returning the bow. 'There's a few of us these days.'

His eyes widened at the sight of a genuflecting Supreme Leader, and he slid a glance towards Captain Ocram, who nodded. 'Very nice to meet you then, Miss Rey. Menan has lots to say about you.'

'I wanted to talk to you about your rebellion, your Excellency.'

'Oh. That's all in the past, there's no rebellion any more. With the help of our glorious protectors, the First Order, all the rebels have been eliminated.'

'I didn't actually want to discuss what you're doing about it, I was more interested in why it's happening in the first place. I also hear you have the best stocked textiles bazaar in the quadrant, perhaps we can talk and walk at the same time? I find myself in need of some new clothes.'

It would also be significantly easier to extract information from him in a situation with which he was familiar, and one in which it would be harder to be overheard.

She turned to face the ranks of stormtroopers who had exited the transports and were lined up on the landing pad waiting to accompany her. 'This detachment will stay with the ships, in case anyone attempts to steal one,' she announced. 'By order of the Supreme Leader.'

She spoke with his authority, after all, even if that wasn't what he would have said.

She wove her way as quickly as possible into the deepest part of the market, followed by her guide and flanked by Captain Ocram who stayed a discrete distance behind. The market itself was immense, full of noise and bustle, a thousand traders hawking their wares and a thousand thousand buyers all attempting to get the best deal.

'You're saying it isn't about money, then?' she continued, halting the flow of the little man's words momentarily.

'No, although that doesn't help. This is a trading hub, we don't rely on the First Order's money to get by, but we're paying them an awful lot of credits to protect us from the Azaxi and they aren't doing it. The traders' guild is annoyed, and it was a couple of their most militant members who blew up that convoy of stormtroopers the other week. If the First Order were doing their job properly we could get on with ignoring them, the same way we ignore every bunch of crazed despots who tries to control the free market. My citizens are angry because we're paying for a service and we're not getting it, and nobody likes that.'

'Who are the Azaxi?'

His expression turned. 'Bunch of murdering slavers. They kidnap innocent citizens and sell them off to the entertainment worlds of Markas Three. The men become gladiators or servants, the women prostitutes and the children – sometimes they will kill the parents just to take their kids. I wouldn't darken your day by telling you what they do to those poor children.' His voice dropped. 'And the worst part is, some traders say the First Order is deliberately not controlling the Azaxi so that we'll have to pay them even more protection money. If that turns out to be true, well, this whole place will blow. The First Order will know what it's like to have a proper rebellion on their hands. No offence.'

A large woman in a voluminous dress barged past Rey on her way to the nearest stand, her head covered, a flash of dark skinned hand holding closed her cowl.

'And do you know how I can get in touch with the rebels?' She lowered her voice, glanced around.

'I'm sure I don't know,' his Excellency said. 'But I'm also sure that if you bought something from that stall right over there, you'd like it.' He waggled his considerable eyebrows at her.

The big woman attempted to shuffle past Rey again, this time on her way to the same stand that the Chief Haggler had indicated, and there was something in the way she walked that was familiar, although Rey couldn't place it. Rey picked through the merchandise on offer, noting that both Captain Ocram and Mimrod the Third were talking animatedly deliberately out of hearing distance, and causing quite a distraction. The other woman pointed at a necklace. 'Try this dear, it would look lovely on you.'

Rey caught her breath, blinked tears from her eyes, then reached out and squeezed the other woman's hand as hard as she dared.

'Finn,' she whispered. 'Finn.'

He nudged her away. 'I'm in disguise.'

'I can see that. How did you know I'd be here?'

'Friend of a friend in a different resistance, apparently. Leia got a message. I knew you weren't working for them, I knew it.'

'Why would I be? Oh. You intercepted the announcement that said I'd defected.'

'Chewbacca picked it up as we were loading, but all of us knew it wasn't true. Kylo Ren's keeping you prisoner, isn't he? Don't tell him anything.'

'I haven't told him anything. He hasn't actually asked me anything, but he wants me to be his apprentice and he's got me locked up next to his bedroom so he can watch me all night, as well as all day.'

'Kylo Ren watches you all night? Rey? Has he - you know? I'll kill him.'

'No, no. Calm down or they'll notice you.'

He fastened a hand on her wrist. 'This whole place is crawling with troops. Most of the people in the market aren't shopping, they're are all First Order spies – we've been watching them arrive all day. They've already noticed me, I'm just hoping they won't recognise me.'

'Then how are we going to escape?'

He slid his fingers down, clutched her hand. 'I can't get you out, not today, there are too many of them. I just came to give you a message – that we haven't forgotten you, and we're working on a plan.'

She squeezed back. 'How long?'

'I don't know,' he whispered. 'But be ready when we come.'

He moved on to the next stall, and then the next, pretending to shop until she lost him in the crowd. She held her head high all the way back to the shuttle, unwilling to let them see her cry. She wasn't going to escape today, but she might escape tomorrow. She still had friends, and they would come for her when they could. All she had to do was survive.

But as she docked with the Star Destroyer she still felt like a little piece of her had died.


	8. Chapter 8

He wanted her to be grateful - she could tell by the expectant expression on his face when she forced herself into the training hangar two weeks later. Two more weeks of captivity, two weeks of idle chat with cooks, dentists, cleaners, support staff, two weeks of reading intelligence reports, two weeks of practising lightsaber drills in her room, two weeks of waiting for rescue. She was driven back into his company through boredom more than anything else. And she was still expected to be grateful because he'd let her out to Duuk and then filled the entire moon full of his men, so he could control her every step.

'What's next?' she asked, as rudely as possible.

He straightened. 'Dual drills. I know you've been working on the single ones. The Jedi valued teamwork, I never understood why, but everyone was expected to train together, as a way of building trust.' He came to stand immediately behind her, so close she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. 'Today we're going to do the drills together. With lightsabers.' His hummed into incarnadine life at her side. 'We'll do the same movements in tandem, but if you make a mistake or if you turn too quickly or step the wrong way, you'll probably slice my arm off. '

She grinned, because he couldn't see it.

'I thought you'd like that. Go.'

She could do the various positions and combinations with her eyes closed, moved into them swiftly, feeling his presence wrapped around her back like a shroud. Several times she turned fast enough to catch him out, but he was always one step ahead and eventually she gave up trying.

'What's the point of this? Apart from to make me really uncomfortable?'

He stayed where she couldn't see him. 'We fought together once before, and it was a disaster. We should have been able to beat the Praetorian Guard without breaking a sweat, but I had to spend the whole time looking around to see if you needed help. Next time we fight together you need to know where I am and what I'm going to do without thinking about it, and vice versa.'

'Next time?'

'Combat training. Out in the field. I understand you're quite keen to get off the ship.'

She turned, cautiously. 'You're suggesting we go out and fight people together? For fun? That's not Jedi training.'

'Jedi training in a Sith environment. Do you want to get out or not?'

'You said this was a trust exercise. Do I have to trust you to do it?'

He raised his eyebrows as if genuinely surprised. 'Of course not. I never trust anyone. Nor should you. If you're through with the questions, just close your eyes, and try to feel everyone else like you on the ship. To me they look like targets on a scanner, but we see things differently, I expect.'

'Who else is like me?'

'No one,' he shot back, looking smug. 'See? Flattery. There are people sensitive to the Force all over the ship. You're not unique. There's the data analyst down on level fifteen, for example. The mechanic who's forever up in the air conditioning vents. Your Captain Ocram, of course.'

'He's on board?'

'I thought it safest to have him where I can see him, from now on.'

She closed her eyes, let her awareness spread though the ship, finding strange spots of warmth that varied in temperature scattered across the infrastructure. They didn't seem aware of her, even the ones that burned brightest, and she played with the control for a while, drawing closer to see if she could sense who they were and what they were doing. She couldn't see their thoughts, but if she concentrated hard enough, she got a vague indication of what they were feeling, what they wanted or what they were focused on. The warm spots were like stars across the galaxy, and she was standing right in front of one that burned with the power of a supernova. She screwed her eyes together against it. 'You're too much for me.'

'Flattery?' He sounded amused.

'It won't be permanent.'

'You only need a minimal level of awareness. I always know exactly where you are and generally what you're doing. That's all. I can teach you to control what access anyone else has to your thoughts, it can come in very useful.'

She reached out towards the bonfire, attempted to cool it down and it winked out with such speed that she fell forward, flinging out her hands. She was caught, but at some point, he'd taken off his gloves and their skin touched for the first time in many weeks.

Her perspective changed instantly. She was still looking into his eyes but instead of standing face to face he was above her and she was lying on her back, on something soft. A sheen of sweat slicked his forehead, his breath was hot on her cheek and her mouth was full of a taste that wasn't her own. Under her hands the muscles in his back flexed and there was tension in her left leg where it was hooked around his waist. His weight pressed her down as his body shifted, driving him further between her thighs.

She reacted immediately, ripping the vision from her mind and sucking in a huge gulp of air. Lashing out blindly she connected with his chest, pushing him away as hard as she could and then sped from the room, flying down corridors with tears clouding her sight, colliding with anyone not swift enough to let her pass.

That couldn't be the future, it couldn't. The shape of it was as solid and clear as the one she'd described to Luke, but this was an abomination she would never share. She would never, ever, let him do that to her. Her captor. A man who had asked her to join him, so he could control every aspect of her life. A monster.

She locked every door she had, and she still didn't feel safe.

She sensed him in the corridor outside her room not long afterwards, and his voice in her mind was edged with sadness.

'Do I disgust you that much?'

She had to get off the ship.


	9. Chapter 9

The man sitting in the opposite chair had been trying his best to explain the graph for the last twenty minutes. Every time she tried to concentrate her mind rebelled and slid away to something more interesting that she could have been doing, which was pretty much anything at this point.

'You see,' he continued. 'This line represents the finances of the Old Republic, funded by taxes, levies, subsidies and grants according to the breakdown I've explained. This line marks the downward trend in cashflow under the Empire, when most of the reserves built up by the Old Republic were used to fund major capital projects such as the Death Star. This further decline becomes more marked during the New Republic, which failed to create the lasting financial stability of its older form. This bar underneath compares these funding streams with that of the First Order. Note the similarity between the capital costs of the Empire and the First Order, compared to their revenue streams.'

Rey sighed. 'And what does all that mean for a scavenger from Jakku?'

Major Breen bent forward, interrupting his colleague. 'We haven't got any money, Supreme Leader. Essentially, the First Order is a small start up business, which has invested heavily in weapons and equipment and has an enormous, and rapidly expanding manpower budget. It's funded by credit, with the money to service the credit repayments coming from protection rackets, organised crime syndication and the theft and sale of natural resources from conquered planets.'

She put her head in her hands. 'We're broke. And all the money we do have comes from violence.'

'All hail the First Order,' said Captain N'doro, tapping his pointer against his leg.

'Then why haven't you two done anything about it? Captain Ocram said you were in charge of all the finances when I asked for someone to explain it to me. If you're in charge, why are we in this mess?'

The two men looked at each other, and Major Breen appeared to come to a decision. 'Because we don't sit on the military council. All the army cares about is where the next Dreadnaught is coming from, not whether we can afford it or not. They don't want to know about the detail.'

'Which brings me to you, Lieutenant Vanya. You're in charge of procurement, aren't you? I've heard about the union disputes affecting the supply of weapons, and uniforms, and I know General Hux is expecting a new Dreadnaught any minute now – how can we afford that if we can't afford blasters?'

The young woman passed a hand over her forehead. 'The shipyard at Kuat-Entralla Engineering is refusing to complete the fit out of the next Mega class Dreadnaught until we've paid the last six months of outstanding instalments. We owe them trillions of credits and they are not happy. I tried to explain it to the other Supreme Leader last week and he nearly choked me to death.'

Rey tapped her finger on her chin, sent a short, and succinct mental message to the man currently shouting at someone different in the room next to hers. 'Please stop choking our Head of Procurement. She is doing her best.'

He replied, 'Noted,' and that was it.

'I'll have a word with him about that. Carry on.'

'Military procurement is slow and difficult at the best of times, but I've never worked for an organisation before that thinks it can turn up on the doorstep of our biggest supplier, threaten them with a blaster and expect to get what it wants. And we don't even have any blasters.'

Rey turned back to the two other worried faces in the room. 'So, we need to do something about the personnel budget to free up some cash for purchasing, is that basically it?'

Major Breen spread his hands. 'Good luck with that. None of us has the ear of the generals and they need troops to keep the war going.'

'I have the Head of Personnel coming over tomorrow, I'll see what I can do. Now, I think we're finished, unless you want to stay for a game of dejarik, I have friends coming over.'

Haight and Janeek arrived ten minutes later, in the throes of a heated argument.

'Go on then, ask her.' Janeek pushed Haight forward, unwrapped the customary bottle of Corellian brandy and set it on the dining table.

'No, I can't she might...' The rest of the sentence disappeared into whispers.

'Ask me what?'

Janeek unscrewed the top, poured out three healthy slugs into the waiting glasses. 'There's a stormtrooper down in T8 section, Haight's so desperate to get his attention it's embarrassing. So, last night Haight's all giving it large about how he knows the Supreme Leader's girlfriend and I said that you're not his girlfriend because I clean both of your rooms and both your beds are always slept in, so you can't be at it.'

Rey winced.

Haight broke in. 'But I said that you've got to be his girlfriend or why would he go to so much trouble to look after you?'

'I'm not his girlfriend, and I don't want to talk about it. Switch the board on, I thought we were going to play.'

Haight wasn't giving up so easily. 'Wife then - are you secretly married?'

'Not unless it's a secret from me too.'

'Mistress?'

'I can't imagine anyone else is stupid enough to have married him, so no, I'm not his mistress.'

'One of those things where you're not quite a good as a mistress?'

'Concubine? I don't even know what that is, and if you say 'whore' next I'm going to throw you through the wall.'

'Then what are you?'

She shrugged. 'I'm a prisoner.'

The two of them took one look at each other and burst out laughing.

'And the joke is?'

'No one's stopping you getting out, it's everyone else they're stopping getting in,' Haight chortled cryptically.

'I don't understand.'

Janeek flopped into the opposite chair, set up the board for another game. 'About oh, six weeks ago Kylo Ren makes this announcement about how Snoke is dead. He's all scary mask and let's go smash the Resistance and everyone's all fine with that because that's what the army does, right? Then he says he's putting you in charge too, and says you were part of the Resistance and most of the generals go nuts about it. There's this big showdown.

They say they're going to blow you out of the sky, only he's put you in the middle of all the troops, so they can't touch you without killing their own men. They decide they're going to do it anyway, so he says, if they blow you up, they're going to have to blow him up as well. And they don't want to do that because they know they'll be dead before they can push the button. He has this weird - choke you to death without even seeing you - power.

They're all against him, apart from Hux, he's on your side as well. So, the two of them keep you out in space and there's a big row in the office next door. The other Supreme Leader must have killed like thirteen, fourteen of the generals maybe – there were an awful lot less rooms needing cleaning on this floor after that, believe me. The ones who are left promise they'll obey you, but they won't really, and he knows it. They'll kill you first chance they get.

So, he turns The Reaper into a fortress. You're too much of a target for them to resist if you go off the ship, so anywhere you want to go, we go too. He had fifteen legions looking out for you when you went down to Duuk, all making sure you were safe. None of the generals are allowed anywhere near you, so you don't go to any meetings, but he doesn't want you upset, so you can't have access to any communication from outside the ship in case someone tells you that the entire First Order wants you dead.

And now they're all doubting his motives because he's protecting you. They say you've turned him good and the generals are all plotting against him as well. It's a shambles, I can tell you.

So, Haight here thinks that no way would the Supreme Leader go to so much trouble for you unless you two were at it. But I know different.'

Rey rose to her feet. 'Excuse me. I just need to go next door for a second.'

He was in his room, she could tell that now without even thinking, because since she'd turned on her ability to locate other people touched by the Force, she couldn't turn it off. They were all around her at all times and he was the worst. She knew where he was, and something of what he was thinking every minute of every day – she carried him with her, whether she wanted to or not.

Since she always knew where he was, she made sure she was never in the same place, sending him mental messages whenever she needed to, which to which he would reply with one-word answers.

He spent most of his time angry, he slept very little, and he never, ever left the ship. She'd seen it as his need to keep her locked away, and closely guarded, but if she looked at it from the other perspective, maybe he was doing his best to make sure she stayed alive.

She didn't bother to knock, since he'd already know she was coming, just turned the handle and went in. His quarters were almost identical to hers except that his desk was bigger, with more flashing lights, and there were other chairs pushed back against the walls around it. A slew of devices littered the desk, blueprints and maps covering most of the available seating and spilling onto the floor.

He didn't look up as she entered, continuing to read, too worried by something to have much attention to spare.

She spoke almost as soon as she'd shut the door. 'When you asked me to join you, did you think it through? Practically I mean? Did you work out what I'd do, or how anyone else would feel about it?'

He looked tired, she thought, skin too pale, eyes shadowed with strain, his clothes rumpled and creased.

'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

'And it doesn't seem like such a good idea now? I thought I was a prisoner, but that's not what's going on, is it?'

He threw the pad on the table. 'Almost everyone I know wants you dead. Most of them want me dead too, because of you. They think you've seduced me to the light side.' His mouth twisted. 'But nothing could be further from the truth. If they realised you actually were still working for the Resistance you'd be dead already.'

'Controlling me isn't protecting me. I can protect myself.'

He shrugged. 'If I allow you access to transport you'll leave immediately. I know what you think of me, I even understand it. You want to get away. But if you leave it will instantly become the First Order's top priority to hunt you down and wipe out everyone you know, to stop you using all the information you've had access to these last few weeks. If you think you can protect yourself from that then I'll revoke the commands and you can leave tomorrow.'

He made to carry on working, but she bent over the table and he flicked a glance upward. 'That vision I saw between us. That isn't going to happen unless I want it to, is it?'

There was a vehement shake of his head.

'Then you aren't a monster quite yet.'

She turned to leave but he called her back, his tone hesitant, almost, unsure. 'There's a raid tomorrow. On the Azaxi slavers' camp. We could go together, if you'd like?'

She gave him a hard look. 'Combat training?'

'A trust exercise.'

Turning the handle of her own room, she found both men in the process of jumping away from the adjoining wall, with guilty expressions on their faces.

'I hope you're not too drunk to sew, Haight,' she said, opening the wardrobe and surveying the contents with a disapproving eye. 'I'm going to need another outfit.'

Car Crash Bride and Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer, blah, blah, you know the drill.


	10. Chapter 10

Rey woke the next morning brimming with excitement, then reconsidered and tried to take a more mature approach. No one should be excited at the thought of going into battle, she might kill someone, or someone might kill her, and unnecessary violence was to be avoided at all costs. Only a homicidal megalomaniac would be excited.

But it was the most interesting thing that had happened to her in weeks, she was getting off the ship, and she could enjoy it as a nice moonlit walk with her lightsaber, if nothing else.

She had a meeting first.

Captain Nenya Matandari had taken over the recently vacated post of Head of Personnel, responsible for recruitment and training, and really wished she hadn't.

'Their demands are ridiculous, Rey.' She took another drag on her First Order branded addictive substance stick and flicked the residue off the end. 'It takes time to select and indoctrinate a stormtrooper, I can't just churn them out in a couple of months. The proper inculcation process takes years. But the staffing demands have doubled every year for the past five years and my team can't keep up. We're having to force people into the army and some of them already have names – imagine that. They're too old to voluntarily give up their identity and accept their role in the Order, they fight it. Our rate of recidivism is one fifth. It's embarrassing.'

'Recidivism?' Rey asked weakly, making a mental note to ask Janeek to clean up the splatter marks on the floor.

'One fifth of stormtroopers have broken their training in some way over the last year. I've got so many in reconditioning they're queueing out of the door. I think a lot of it is boredom.'

She lit another stick from the remains of the first, pursed her lips as the hit reached her veins, then bent forward. 'Did you know we have troops guarding factories now? I had a transfer request in last week for one unit who was being asked to stand at the end of a bench all day watching some old lady make pants. That's not what life in the First Order is supposed to be about.'

'And what is it supposed to be about?'

'Haven't you read the objectives – everyone's supposed to have a copy in their room. The purpose of the First Order is to eliminate disorder from the galaxy. We take young people, train them, give them useful skills and transferable experience in a command and control environment and then we take them out and show them the universe. It does not involve pants.'

'I see your point. I assume you're not on the military council?'

She snorted, hocked back a wad of phlegm and spat it on the floor. 'That's what I think of them.'

Janeek was going to have something to say about that.

Rey was dressed hours before the scheduled time. Haight had done a better job of replicating her old clothes this time, maybe because he was more familiar with the fabric. She'd gone for the short-sleeved tunic and tight trousers again, but tucked them into leather knee high boots and strapped on what she now thought of as her sword belt. She examined herself critically in the mirror, unsure whether or not this was a step too far. She was going on a raiding party in the dark and almost everyone on both sides would want to kill her. Wearing white was tantamount to painting a target on her back, so instead, she was head to toe in black.

She didn't really recognise herself in it, the contrast making her face pale and her eyes glitter in a way that was almost menacing. She swished the lightsaber a few times. In this outfit she looked…frightening and she felt… free. Like this was a costume she could pull on and take off and pretend to be someone else in-between. It wasn't really her.

She opened the door, knowing he was waiting but she was thumbing the lift before he'd caught up.

'What?'

He gave her a look out of the corner of his eye that ran from head to toe and everywhere in between. 'Nothing. The Axazi are slavers, and they specialise in selling children into the sex market so I wouldn't worry too much about the ethics of what we're about to do.'

'Do you think I would have agreed to come if I was worried about ethics?'

'They will be heavily armed, blasters mostly, but expect some rapid fire, heavy calibre weapons and ion cannons. This is a small outpost, fighters only, no women or children. The camp's perimeter isn't fortified but it's on an open plain, so they'll see us coming. I'm not taking armoured vehicles because this is a training exercise and there's no point in beating them too quickly.'

The lift had reached the hangar bay and he paused to put his mask on. 'Here we go.'

'Why have you started wearing that again?'

'It's new. And I need their fear, remember? Not loyalty and devotion.'

Side by side, they swept out across the floor. There was an honour guard again, despite Rey knowing for a certain fact that all these people had better things to do than stand around waiting for her to board a shuttle and she was conscious that behind their helmets, each of these soldiers was watching her dramatic entrance.

She attempted to keep her face entirely still, as humourless as his. Her boots clicked across the expanse of sparkling metal. Beside her loomed the imposing figure of Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order, his black robes swishing as he strode across the hall. If she was really going to pull off this dark side thing she decided, she was going to need a cloak, as a bare minimum.

'You're enjoying this, aren't you?' Ben said in her head, and she was mildly surprised to realise she was thinking of him as Ben again.

'Tell me something sad, I think I'm going to laugh.'

'Black suits you.'

'Flattery?'

'Sincerity.'

'Well, it suits you, too.'

He took the mask off as soon as they were on board the ship, and he settled into the pilot's chair while she strapped herself in beside him.

'We have support troops, but you and I are the vanguard and we'll lead the attack. You can use the drills we practised but improvise, this is about strengthening the way we work together.'

He laid in the co-ordinates. 'Stay close to me and if we get separated, meet me back at the shuttle.'

The ship cleared the Star Destroyer and headed out into space, flanked by a couple of transports and some short-range fighters.

'Keep your weight forward, you tend to be flat footed on the turn.'

'Noted.'

'Don't get tempted into chasing your opponent, let him come to you, it's safer.'

'I will.'

'If you get tired, take a break or switch to a blaster.'

'Understood. And Ben? You don't need to worry about me so much. I've done this before.'

But when the ship landed, disgorging them onto a grey, featureless desert with the searchlights of the Azaxi settlement already illuminating the sky, and she realised she hadn't done this before. She'd never planned and executed a clandestine attack, never followed orders, never killed a man without having been attacked first – she was just a little girl in silly clothes a long way from home.

Then someone from the darkness fired at her and her instincts overrode her doubts. She came up out of hiding with Ben at her side, ignited her weapon and the two beams of light flashed through the darkness in a tandem dance of destruction.

From what she saw of various Axazi warriors, rushing towards her with pistols blazing, they had the strength and aggression of warthogs and all of the looks. She cut them down one after the other, not really seeing or caring whether they were dead or mortally injured, concentrating exclusively on the next opponent to come her way.

'If you're quite finished playing,' Ben said from somewhere over on her right and she fought her way back across to him feeling sheepish, taking up a position at his back and allowing the Axazi to surround them. She let her awareness of him in her head rise, and then the battle really started.

It was like having an extra pair of arms and legs, she decided after a while, like a single brain controlled them both. If she dodged left, he was there too, supporting the move, he ducked, and she leapt over him, smashing his opponent out of the way. She flung out an arm in an ambitious swipe and he was under it already, chopping the legs from another. She couldn't possibly be enjoying it, not death and blood and chaos, no one who had ever wanted to be a Jedi could possibly be actually enjoying this, but the exhilaration that filled her was unlike anything she had ever known.

With him at her side she felt like she could do anything, because they were superb together. Powerful. Deadly. She was a single part of a greater whole and in that moment, in the white-hot focus of the middle of the fight, she trusted him implicitly.

The last Azaxi fighter on the field fell to a well-aimed lightsaber throw, she whirled, and because it was an extension of the connection she felt, she seized a handful of his tunic, pulled him down and kissed him on the mouth, hard.

Then she snatched her weapon and ran in the direction of the camp, yelling. His voice echoed in her mind. 'I'm not complaining, but I think you might be getting carried away.'

They wiped out the slave traders, dropping one and spinning on to the next as she tried more and more extreme feats, knowing he'd support her in whatever she did. It was faultless. Or almost faultless, if you didn't count the storage container she tried to remotely pull down on to someone's head which stubbornly refused to move, or the time she tried to run up a wall, emulating his aerial manoeuvres and fell flat on her face.

At one point, while they were standing in a darkened hut, back to back, waiting to crash out and surprise the last few slavers she found herself with a tight grip on his hand, and it felt so natural she didn't consider letting go.

She made a mistake near the end though, running so fast after a particularly slippery assailant that she blundered out into the middle of a landing bay completely on her own. A discarded blaster, pulled by the Force into service caught him in the back halfway up the ramp of the waiting Azaxi shuttle. She nudged the pigman with her foot, checking he was dead, and then stopped, the adrenalin pumping through her body falling away in an instant and leaving her sick and exhausted.

She was alone, and she had found a ship. Weeks of waiting had finally gifted her the opportunity to escape and there was no time to be lost, she could power up the engines, blast away to the nearest friendly star system, and never have to see the First Order again.

And yet…

She turned, obeying the nagging question in her mind and found him standing there in the shadows, just staring at her. He said nothing, either out loud or in her mind, simply switched off his lightsaber and waited.

It was a few short steps to freedom. She hesitated.

Behind him, something moved. She sensed rather than saw it, the raising of a wrist, the squeezing of a trigger, a blaster, aimed at his back, which he wasn't going to notice because his whole attention had been given to her.

The reaction was quicker than thought. She paused the blaster bolt in mid-air and she came back down the ramp at a run, her jaw set, sprinting past him with anger propelling her legs and a black vengeance in her heart.

There were men in the shadows, tall, well fed, well-built men, indistinguishable in their matching cloaks, hoods up, faced covered. They were not Azaxi, and they bore no insignia, although the weapons they were pointing at her were supposed to be in short supply.

The joy she had experienced was gone, hardened into a blunt resolution and she no longer worried about dark side or light side. She was a killer, and she brought death. The first man went down to a top lunge, elbows low as she'd been taught, his neck fountaining blood. The next managed to fire a shot, and she ripped out his throat with the tip of her sword. Behind her, Ben dispatched two more, and she fought beside him not for amusement but for survival.

It was a short, bitter fight, over quickly but it left a scar. Tears sprang hot and thick down her cheeks and the off switch eluded her until the lightsaber dropped from her hands.

Then strong, reassuring arms wrapped around her, pulling her in and she sobbed, held tight against his chest.


	11. Chapter 11

'Don't you have anything better to do?' She'd answered the door in her shift, bleary eyed from the sleeping pills. 'Like errrarghhh.' She made a choking noise as she stepped back.

'General Ras? He's already left our employment.'

Squinting seemed like the least painful option as she tried to focus on the black blur. 'You let him live? After he ambushed and nearly killed us? You have changed.'

'I didn't have a say in it. I went to his quarters after I'd dropped you off with the medics and he'd already resigned, in a manner of speaking. Blaster bolt to the head.'

'I'll be doing that if this headache goes on much longer. Give me a minute to get dressed.'

She left him in the lounge and went for a quick shower, donning her own clothes, now dingy grey with overuse and returned towelling her hair, wincing at the strain in her arms. 'I'm not doing anything that involves lifting,' she announced, bending over to pull on her boots and feeling the sore, pulled muscles in her legs. 'Or running.'

'My master always made me run around that hangar fifty times after a combat session. Said it was a test of mental character.'

'Your master was a homicidal megalomaniac.'

'And yours isn't?'

'I'm not sure what you are, any more.'

'I'll consider that progress. Shall we go?'

He let her sit on the floor just outside the entrance to their usual training space, hidden from the curious glances of the personnel working on parked fighters by a pile of storage boxes. He gestured towards the dual winged shuttle to which she'd staggered back to the night before, heavily supported by an arm around the waist.

'This is an old exercise. Lift the ship, but don't scratch it, or I'll be cross.'

Because they were side by side, it was easy to nudge him in the ribs. 'How cross?'

'I've killed people for less.'

She struggled, but there was no danger to his paintwork because no matter how hard she stretched out, the metal hulk refused to move.

'The problem is,' he remarked after a while. 'That you only look at the surface. You know it's a shuttle, so you're expecting it to be heavy. Your expectations are holding you back. Look deeper.'

'What? Focus on the electrics or something?'

'No. What I mean is, your view of life is very black and white. You're a Jedi, that's a shuttle, I'm a homicidal megalomaniac. Look deeper.'

She glanced at him askance. 'That really is a shuttle, Ben. It's never going to be anything else.'

He rested his head against the wall, eyes fixed on the ceiling. 'All my life people have wanted me to be one thing or another. Light side or dark side. When I was little, my parents expected me to be perfect – and they couldn't stand the thought that I wasn't. It was always 'Ben doesn't want to do his homework, maybe he's turning to the dark side' or 'Ben kicked the cat, he must be Lord of the Sith.' I tried so hard to be what they wanted but I was never good enough. They were glad when I went away to train, it meant they didn't have to deal with me anymore.'

A shadow crossed his face and he spent some time jamming his gloves more closely onto his hands.

'Then I met someone who told me it was alright to be different. But it turned out that he wanted me to be perfect too, and it was 'Kylo, wipe out that village, prove you're not a Jedi' and 'Kylo, murder your friends, demonstrate your loyalty.' I tried to live up to his expectations too and I failed. No one has ever just wanted me for who I am, because who I am isn't good enough. Everyone I meet wants to change me.'

She reached over and brushed his leg.

'What I'm trying to say is…don't feel too bad about what happened to you last night. I understand what it's like to be pulled in both directions. I'm probably the only person who understands.'

She sat back again, frowning. 'What do you think happened to me last night?'

'You felt the power of the dark side. You enjoyed it. The authority. The violence. The blood. It's alright. That's why I asked you to let the past die. Let go of the light and the dark and just be who you want to be.'

'But I haven't turned to the dark side.' She folded her arms.

'Let go, Rey. Embrace your destiny.' His tone was still soothing, but his assumptions irritated her.

'I really haven't turned. I haven't.'

He crossed his own arms, his temper flashing. 'I know what I felt. Stop lying to yourself. You enjoyed it.'

'Yes, I enjoyed it, but I haven't turned to the dark side. I enjoyed it because I was with you.'

There was a very, very long silence, in which he resumed his minute consideration of the ceiling and she looked anywhere else but at him.

Eventually, she attempted to see the shuttle as something more than a shuttle, reached out, and managed to destroy two of its landing struts and crash the nose into the floor.

'That'll polish out,' she said.

'It doesn't matter.'

His hand unpeeled itself from his leg, moved across to her lap, picked up her hand, and held it.

She looked at the ceiling. Handholding had been normal last night, she hadn't given it a second thought, but here in the hangar bay, here in the daytime where it seemed to mean something different, here, it made her mouth dry. Her heart thundered in her chest, her stomach tensed, and she was glad he still had his gloves on because her palms were sweaty.

The obvious answer was to yank her hand away, remember the atrocities he had committed, the people he had killed, the fact that he was an enemy to everyone she called a friend, but she'd never been attracted to the obvious answer. He wanted her to let the past die, and that included his past, maybe more than anything else.

She let him hold her hand, and after a while, she held his back.

Even more time passed before he said, 'Let's try that again.'

The fingers that weren't cocooned in her lap raised, and the shuttle along with it, sliding smoothly and easily into the air, glittering in its pristine majesty.

'Take it,' he said, and she tried, she really did, but it landed so hard that one of the wings dropped off.

'It's fine,' he said. 'I'll order a new one.'

'I'm not sure you can afford it. I've been meaning to ask you something though – what's the point of the First Order? What's it for?'

'Haven't you read any of the stuff in your room? There are supposed to be, I don't know, pamphlets?'

'I lost all four thousand and thirty of them.'

'It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilisation may be returned to the stability that promotes progress.'

'And after you've done that, once you've removed disorder from the galaxy, what happens then?'

His attention was on his fingers, twined through hers, white on black. 'At the moment, I really don't care.'


	12. Chapter 12

That afternoon, she realised for the first time that she didn't mind being on the ship. Of course, there were stormtroopers stationed at both ends of the corridor now, and every time she went out on her own she was flanked by the Praetorian Guard, but The Reaper no longer felt as alien as it had once done. It had a rhythm of its own, a routine with which she had become familiar, and she wondered whether, if she had to live there for the rest of her life, she might actually come to like it.

Voices woke her in the middle of the night. Men's mostly, but there were a few women mixed in, a tone of urgency common to all. They were shouting so loudly she could hear them through the wall. She flung on a full-length robe from the closet and went next door to investigate.

Ben's room was full of people, all uniformed, most of them on their feet, although he was sitting at his desk, lightsaber on prominent display to one hand. The door was open, so she just stepped cautiously into the room. His eyes jumped to her immediately and he gave a tiny shake of his head.

A tall, skinny man, to whom Ben had been speaking, followed the movement and announced in a voice loud enough to silence the rest of the room, 'Supreme Leader, at last we make your acquaintance.'

A rustle of whispers crackled in the stillness.

Ben ordered, 'Rey, go back to bed.'

To her left, someone sniggered. The sense of danger in the room was palpable. The skeleton near the desk creaked into life. 'I couldn't possibly allow that – not when we've all been desperate for an introduction for the last two months.'

He stalked across the space, bowed low and pressed a slimy kiss to the back of her hand. 'Such a pleasure to meet the Supreme Leader's…'

He stalled for long enough that she felt the need to help him out. 'Girlfriend? Wife? Whore?'

He smiled, tutting. 'Weakness,' he finished.

She yanked her hand away. 'I heard shouting.' She added silently, 'Are you alright?'

'Shouting? No, a robust exchange of views on the Telanian system. Tell me, Supreme Leader, with your military training and skills, how would you destroy it?'

'I'd imagine it's easy to destroy a couple of weapons factories, the problem is how do you stop it destroying you back?'

She padded over to the desk, conscious that not only was she the only person in the room with bare feet and no underwear, but her lightsaber was a durasteel wall away. She perched on the front of Ben's desk and thumbed a few commands, until a holographic map of the Telanian system filled the middle of the office.

'You can destroy the blaster factories, but your problem is the Sonn-Blas Corporation, which is run as a collective. Destroy the blaster factories here,' she reached out with the Force casually, ignited Ben's lightsaber and gestured at the map with it to illustrate her point.

'And the union which runs the factories that supply all your other weapons – the rifles, the cannons, even the flamethrowers, they will all refuse to supply you. You'll be forced to move troops, ground support and ships into these locations, here, here and over here, to keep the peace. And because you're in a single source arrangement, there aren't any other suppliers you can call on at short notice for the volumes you need, so you're going to run out of weapons pretty quickly. But that's not your real problem.

You see, it's not just the weapons manufacturers you've fallen out with. You haven't been paying your smaller suppliers either. As soon as the strike begins, you'll find disturbances on the other worlds in the quadrant.'

She reached behind her, jabbed a few more buttons and the quadrant map appeared, with supplier locations marked. The lightsaber swooped with a curl of her wrist, causing several of the generals surrounding the map to jump back.

'You'll lose armour, clothing, food, raw materials, and so on. You'll have to step in to secure the supply chain, which puts your remaining forces here.'

She moved miniature destroyers, cruisers, frigates into their respective positions.

'Starting to see a pattern? Most of the smaller worlds don't really care about your money. They've been supporting you because of the objective of the First Order, which is – if you wouldn't mind quoting, Supreme Leader.'

She paused, waiting for Ben to reel off his mission statement. 'It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilisation may be returned to the stability that promotes progress.'

'Precisely. You promised to keep the peace. Most of the smaller worlds are paying you protection money so the cartels, the slavers, the drug runners and all the other disorderly elements don't overrun them. But your military training and skills decided it was better to take the protection money, and let the cartels do whatever they wanted anyway, as long as you carried out a few token raids to confiscate their resources. You let them grow strong.'

She tuned back to the map, expanded it further to include the fleet, strung out across the stars. 'You really should have listened to Captain Ocram you know, he's been warning you about this for years. So, what do we notice? Here is the First Order army, scattered across the galaxy, nicely spread out. And while none of these smaller rebellions could tackle you head on, when you're this isolated you're easier to pick off. There will be battles, but they won't be the sort of battles you can win with weapons the size of a planet, even if you had any left. The cartels will come for you, the factory workers, the ordinary people – let's face it, anyone you've ever been nasty to in the street will see that you're vulnerable and they'll take you on.'

'No, I hear you cry.' She paused again, swung the lightsaber round until it was almost resting against the jugular of an increasingly pale general. 'I said, no, I hear you cry.'

He whispered, 'No.'

'No, I hear you cry, these little gangs are no match for us. The rebel scum can't take us on, they don't have the resources. But you didn't listen to Lieutenant Vanya either, your Head of Procurement. You've neglected your biggest creditor. What's the First Order's most valuable financial asset, do you think? Major Breen would have told you, if you'd bothered to ask.'

She jerked the lightsaber at the floor. 'The fleet. The Dreadnaughts, the Star Destroyers, the cruisers, the frigates and the fighters, who do you think built them? Kuat-Entralla Engineering. A company to whom you owe trillions of credits, and who now want their money back. You wanted to be better than the Empire, so you commissioned ships eight times the size of Imperial Destroyers, at eight times the cost. The Fulminatrix was only half paid off, and now it's so much orbiting scrap. The Supremacy was entirely on credit, and you've lost that too. Your third Dreadnought is never leaving the shipyard.'

She looked around for Hux, found him some way behind Ben's chair, keeping as far away from the other generals as possible. 'Sorry.'

He nodded back.

'Because they know you can't pay. And they want the rest of their assets back. But they're only a company, right, they can't touch you?'

She inclined her head, without taking her eyes off her audience. 'Did you have a good look at that Azaxi shuttle yesterday, Ben? It was a Kuat model, top of the line. The Azaxi live in mud huts, they could never afford that level of technology. The Kuatis have armed your enemies, given them ships, guns, whatever they need, to help them recover their investment.'

She hopped off the desk, took a leisurely stroll through the circle of onlookers.

'But you're still alright, because you've got no weapons, and you've got no ships, but you still have the army. Except that a fifth of them aren't loyal to you anymore. Stormtroopers are trained from birth, but the army has expanded so rapidly that you don't have time for years worth of training – you're basically just slapping armour on your recruits and sending them out. Ask Captain Matandari, she'll tell you. You can't trust the loyalty of your army either.'

She'd reached the other end of the room again, put her back to the door. 'You have no reliable sources of income. Your colonies are restive, because you've debased your currency and you aren't paying them properly. The cartels you run are out of control. You've exhausted your credit. You have an unreliable workforce, no resources and no assets. My best guess is that you've got six months before the First Order is wiped out, three if you destroy Telania. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to organise a resistance. Congratulations, you've destroyed yourselves.'

Every single person in the room wanted her blood. Hands flickered towards weapons, knuckles clenched, almost everyone took a breath in preparation for shouting.

She spoke into the pause. 'Unless you want me to save you.'


	13. Chapter 13

Only one person moved. 'Rebel scum,' yelled the shrivelled grey stick who'd made the mistake of underestimating her. 'The First Order doesn't need you to save it.'

He collapsed to his knees, clutching his throat in response to Ben's extended finger.

General Hux stepped forward. 'Shut up, Marten. I think we all want to hear what else she has to say.' He gave her a watery smile. 'Carry on.'

She nodded back, grateful for the support. 'I haven't finalised all the details yet, but this is how I think it goes. First – purge the army. Fear doesn't work as a method of control long term, you need people who are loyal to you in your ranks. Let any stormtrooper, civilian staff, support worker who doesn't want to be here leave. Ferry them off to the nearest planet and give them your best wishes.

Without as many passengers you won't need as many ships. Send ten Star Destroyers back to Kuat, as a down payment on the debt on condition that the ships are scrapped, and they withdraw their support for your enemies.

And then we're going to withdraw. From everything. We're going to break every supplier contract, we're going to evacuate from every conquered world, we'll stop protecting the dependent planets and we'll cease supporting the organised crime syndicates. We'll need some time to rationalise and retrain the army anyway, so we'll go back to the Unknown Regions and regroup.'

The room grew restive around her, so she rushed on.

'Without the First Order, the galaxy will fall apart. They may hate you, but that's the only thing that's stopping them hating each other. There's no Republic to step in. Every system is out for itself. There will be chaos.

So we let it be known that the First Order is seeking allies. In return for ten per cent of revenues, any world may ask to join the First Order and in recompense, we will protect them from their enemies. It will start small. A few systems will join us, and we'll make a very public example of what happens to those who oppose our allies.

More will follow. We will offer stability to the universe as part of our alliance. And we'll also offer favourable trade terms to those within it. We will use the taxes we earn from our allies to set up our own shipyards, munitions factories, uniform manufacturers, so that we can never be held hostage by our suppliers again. We might even pay off our debts.

Systems will flock to join us. The universe runs on credits, and chaos is bad for business. We will be loyal to our allies, but severe with their enemies, and we will not rule with fear, because it costs too much, for one thing.'

General Marten had been allowed to stand again, rather unfortunately. 'She's bringing back the Republic,' he said in horror.

Rey smiled at him. 'No. You need to look deeper. A friend of mine keeps telling me to let the past die, but I don't think that's right. I think you should learn from the past, not ignore it altogether. Look at the Empire – it tried to rule with fear and ended up creating a resistance that destroyed it. The New Republic was no better – it tried to rule with loyalty and had no answer when you defied and overthrew it.'

Her attention shifted to Ben. 'Nothing and no one is ever just one thing or the other. The Empire was too much towards the dark side, and it failed, the Republic, too much towards the light. If you really want to fulfil the First Order – to remove disorder, create stability and foster progress – then you need to understand both sides. You need both to succeed, the dark and the light. This is Resistance politics in a First Order environment. The free will and the iron fist. '

She ran out of words. She'd done a lot of thinking over the past few weeks, mostly because she'd had nothing else to do, and the answer she'd come up with was the only solution that seemed to work for them, and the only set of circumstances under which she'd ever stay. She gazed into Ben's shadowed eyes across the room and she wondered if he knew that.

The obvious answer to 'join me' should have been no, if not at first, then as soon as it became clear that he really hadn't thought the whole thing through. So, she'd had to come up with a less obvious answer, something that balanced both sides. She wasn't ever going to turn, and he wasn't ever going to change unless she pushed him. The rest of the universe was just going to have to shift around them.

She waited, not knowing if the military elite would be able to accept the challenge she'd laid down. It kept their objective intact, as well as their precious army, but their perspective would have to alter, and they'd have to start looking at the detail, as she had. In its current form, the First Order was already over, it was just taking a while for everyone else to realise that.

The silence lasted so long that she took a step backwards, on the point of running for her lightsaber.

Then Hux slowly, slowly lowered himself to one knee and bowed his head. 'Supreme Leader,' he said.

It rippled around the room, the kneeling, and the acknowledgement until she was the only person standing and only one other individual would meet her eyes. He stood, black and severe across the other side of the room, a chasm between them she wasn't sure he'd cross, and then he stepped forward, striding purposefully through the uniformed figures until he was close enough to touch.

He put one hand on either side of her face and kissed her.

Behind the sensation of lips, and pressure, Rey was aware of a low murmur from the ginger general.

'Now I understand. You're not his anything. He's yours.'

Ben broke off rapidly. 'And I'm not deaf. Go to bed Rey, I'll see you later.'

This time there were a lot more sniggers.

The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available now on Amazon.


	14. Chapter 14

For the first time, Ben was there when she woke up. She knew that it wouldn't be the last time. There was a little fluttering, tickling sensation inside her, half nerves, half excitement when she looked at him, concentrating on a screen he held in his hands, hair falling into his eyes, a frown creasing his forehead.

She was going to see him with his clothes off. She didn't need any kind of vision to know that was true. A time was coming when she'd be able to push that hair out of his eyes for him, kiss away that frown, throw the screen onto the floor, pull him down on top of her and…

'Remind me to teach you about shielding your thoughts sometime,' he said, glancing up. 'But yes, to all those things. We could start now if I wasn't so busy.'

And he attempted a smile. She had never once seen him smile, even when he was joking he was always straight faced. But here was a smile that he appeared to have been saving up especially for her, and he offered it up as a gift.

She hugged her knees to her chest and sat up. 'Is it really going to happen then?' She gestured at the pad.

'I'm just reviewing the movement orders. It isn't a retreat, we're going to regroup and put out the call for allies.'

'Will it work, do you think?'

'Do you think it won't?' He looked horrified for a moment.

'I don't know. I'm just a nobody from Jakku whose parents were filthy junk traders. My mother wasn't a general. Power is your world, not mine.'

His face closed down for a minute. 'It doesn't matter who your parents were, this is your world now, you proved that last night.' He paused. 'The only bit of it I'm not convinced about is the allies. It's just a different form of protection scheme, I understand that – they pay us and we protect them and the more of them there are who pay, the bigger the army gets. I see that you want them to feel like they're getting something out of it too, so that we don't need to deploy forces all the time to make sure they don't rebel, but what I'm not clear on is why we wouldn't just take over as soon as we've rebuilt the army? We could force them to pay more than your tithe and they wouldn't be able to stop us.'

She rolled her eyes. 'Because eventually, we'd be in exactly the same position we are now. You can't base governance on fear. I thought you were known for your fanatical loyalty and devotion – why are you finding it so hard to apply that to anything else?'

He refused to meet her gaze. 'It's hard to be loyal and devoted on an intergalactic scale. Much simpler one on one.'

That reminded her that he was sitting on the end of her bed. 'Will I see you later?'

He tried out the smile again, managing to make it both shy and suggestive at the same time. 'I certainly hope so.'

The memory of that smile sustained her through calls with Captain Ocram, Lieutenant Vanya, Major Breen and Captain Matandari, all of whom contacted her to complain about being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to confirm the account Rey had given to the military council. They were slightly more enthusiastic about the fact that they were now members of the council and were looking forwarding to seeing her again at the next meeting, first thing tomorrow morning.

Rey drifted around aimlessly after the holopad was finally empty, coming across a small card placed in the middle of her desk, upon which had been written a single word – 'Tonight.' Ben must have left it that morning, she thought, although she could tell that he was no longer on the ship and she had no idea what time tonight he meant.

As the hours passed by she became more anxious about the whole thing. It wasn't so much the ethical considerations that were holding her back, she was reconciled to the fact that anyone on the outside would think she'd joined the Order mind, body and soul, her concerns were rather more practical. She'd never trusted anyone enough before to let them into her bed, so she would have to rely on Ben to teach her anything she might need to know. She suspected he'd jump at the chance.

Haight brought a welcome distraction. 'Well, this is goodbye.' He threw out his arms. 'I'm going to miss you so much.'

'Have you been transferred?' She felt unexpectedly wobbly at the thought of the tailor's departure, he'd been a friend over the last few months, or the closest thing it was possible to have to a friend on board.

'Nope, I'm packed up and I'm shipping out. The announcement came through an hour ago. Kylo Ren says anyone who doesn't want to stay in the First Order can leave, without even getting shot, on condition that they get on the first transport out and leave everything behind. I'm off. Janeek has gone already. I just popped up to say goodbye and well, thank you. I know this is only because of you and him.'

Rey hugged him back. 'Where will you go?'

'Back home. My old job is still open, and I can carry on with my life and forget this ever happened. I won't forget you, of course.' He kissed her on the cheek. 'No one could forget you.'

She blinked a tear from the corner of her eye, but he gave her a cheeky grin. 'I left you a present in the wardrobe, in case you and him ever do work out. Good luck.'

He was off, whistling down the corridor a few short seconds later.

It was a dress, a flawlessly white, floor skimming dress, cinched at the waist with a white belt, complete with lightsaber hook, and a matching cloak which flowed across the floor like molten metal when she put it on.

She spent quite a long time playing with the cloak, then had a very long bath, and spent even more time swirling around the room as day turned into evening. Was this the sort of thing he'd expect her to wear, she wondered? Did it look like she'd dressed up for him, like she was trying too hard? What if he wanted to take the dress off? He'd definitely want to take the dress off. She had to sit down while she thought about that one.

Finally, finally, there came a knock at the door.

Her stomach dropped into her boots, but she swallowed hard, and went to answer it anyway.

She didn't even recognise the caller who shot her in the chest.


	15. Chapter 15

Rey pulled herself up out of a groggy sleep hand over hand, struggling against a tiredness so leaden it felt like a physical weight. She couldn't remember going to bed, let alone falling asleep, and the hardness of the mattress against her back was more uncomfortable than usual. She attempted to turn over, then realised with a sudden sharp snap into wakefulness that she couldn't.

Her eyes popped open and she tried to move her head, finding that she was strapped to a table, restraints across her chest and arms and more securing her ankles. She thrashed against the metal, thought better of it and called her lightsaber, but it didn't come.

She scanned the room quickly. There was no equipment she could lift and drag towards her, no people to be compelled into helping, simply a blank grey room with a very large window on one side.

Making herself relax, she reached out and tried to sense anyone else in the vicinity who might possess a connection to the Force. There weren't many, and she was disappointed to find that Ben wasn't in range either, whatever her range might be, although there was a presence that felt a little bit like him close at hand.

'Leia.'

'Has anyone ever told you that you shout?'

Rey felt a soft pull inside her, but now was not the time. 'Ben mentioned it occasionally.'

There was a lull in her brain before the answer came back, slow and guarded. 'And, how is he?'

Rey considered that. 'Furious, I should think. Where am I?'

'Somewhere safe,' Leia replied, without being more specific. 'I'll send someone in to let you out.'

'Oh. Why am I tied up if I'm on a Resistance base?'

Leia's response was careful. 'You were taken from the Supreme Leader's quarters. We intercepted the communication to say you'd defected. Finn was convinced it wasn't true, but we thought you'd find a way to escape or contact us, and the longer you stayed out of touch the more it looked like you'd turned to the dark side. Have you?'

'Of course not. You'd be able to tell if I had, wouldn't you?'

'Maybe. But have you been working for the First Order? Some of our intelligence suggests you're on the military council.'

'I've met them once,' she offered, not knowing to what extent Leia's powers might be able to penetrate her thoughts.

She couldn't exactly lie to the Resistance, who were her friends, but then she couldn't exactly tell Leia the truth either – especially not Leia, who had lost more than anyone.

'What is it you can't tell me the truth about?' The older woman sounded suspicious.

Rey could already sense that this was not going to have a happy ending. Ben would undoubtedly come looking for her, except that it would be Kylo Ren leading the search, and he was going to be not just furious, but something beyond furious that involved smashing up an entire star system when he realised she was back with the Resistance again. She should be grateful to be free. Apart from obviously being tied to a table, no one here was going to stop her going where she wanted or doing what she wanted. She was free to hide in any hole she chose before Ben pried her out of it.

But her mind felt hollow without him.

If she stayed here she would never touch him, except in anger, would never see him, except across a battlefield. That instant, powerful connection between them would blow away like smoke in the wind.

Leia had waited long enough for an answer. 'Report to me for debriefing,' she snapped.

A door that Rey couldn't twist her head enough to see hissed open and Finn's familiar tread entered the room.

'Let's get this off you,' he tutted, releasing the bonds enough that she could sit up and hug him. But he drew away too quickly. 'How've you been? Everything alright? Good. Sorry about all this, General's orders, you know how it is. She wants to see you right away.'

'I know.' Rey tried to catch his eye, struggled with it. 'Finn – is everything alright?'

'Same old, same old. Let's get you to her, shall we?'

She rubbed at her legs, hoping that what she was reading in his reaction, really wasn't there. 'Where am I? And what happened? The last thing I remember is opening my front door.'

'We've had someone on the Destroyer trying to get a message through to you for weeks, but you were too closely guarded. Then your regular cleaner left and our spy got in to your room and left you a message, so you'd be ready. Anyway, he said he called at the door, you had no idea who he was, and started arguing so he stunned you and put you in the cleaning trolley. You were wheeled down to maintenance, loaded into a garbage scow and we picked you up from there.'

'The message said, 'tonight', didn't it? I thought it was from Ben.'

Finn's face twisted at that and he put his hands on her arms, speaking quickly. 'Rey, you've been here for three days. It wasn't me who got you out of the garbage, it was a stranger you didn't know, and you kept going on about how you were the Supreme Leader and then you threw him across the room. Leia had you sedated while we tried to work out if you're still on our side or not. I know you are, I believe you, but almost everyone else thinks you're working for them.'

He'd stopped outside a battered door, set into the middle of a dingy corridor.

'Go in and talk to her. I'll see you on the other side.'

Rey turned the handle and entered, not nervous, but ever so slightly ashamed. Inside were two low chairs, all bare wood and splinters, and on one sat a motherly woman whose eyes were hard and sharp and gave no quarter.

She pointed to the opposite char and although the room was otherwise empty, Rey could tell there were many people watching what was going on inside.

Leia said, 'Nice cloak.'

Rey looked down at the dress sadly. There was a large scorch mark on the left-hand side, the front was shredded in three places, and the white fabric bore liberal spatters of food and other waste that she didn't want to think too much about. The whole thing stank of fish. 'Not anymore.'

The older woman reached over and pinched the material between finger and thumb. 'Expensive. Handmade. Not the clothing of a prisoner.'

'I haven't been able to leave,' she replied, a touch defensively.

'Have you tried?' Leia nodded, and one wall of the room lit up with a grainy picture, taken with poor quality equipment in the dark, from a long way away. Despite all that, it was still possible to identify the woman in black, standing on the ramp of a shuttle, peering inside for up to a minute and then turning and running away. The fact that she was carrying a lightsaber towards the end also helped.

Rey shifted in her chair.

'You see my problem,' Leia continued, in a warm and gentle tone although her eyes were as hard as durasteel. 'You're living in the Supreme Leader's quarters, wearing extremely low-cut dresses that everyone can see straight through and there are no signs of injury or violence on you. You're given an opportunity to leave and you don't. There's only one question I think matters – is it consensual or is it forced?'

'You think he might be forcing me to stay?'

'I think he might be forcing you to do a lot of things.'

She recoiled. 'You really think he's a monster, don't you?'

'He killed his father. Don't you think he's a monster?'

'It's not my place to forgive that.'

'But you're happy to ignore it?'

'No, I.' This was the crux of the problem. It was all very well to sit in an office and spout cosy philosophy about how everyone has a dark side, and quite another to forgive the actions of a murderer. Ben had done some terrible things, most of which Rey probably didn't even know about, and she had feelings for him anyway. It was probably the dark side in her that meant she could empathise with a monster, but then again, maybe empathy was something of the light.

'I think he can change,' she continued.

Leia leaned forward, put her chin on her fist. 'Why?'

Rey didn't much want to admit the truth to his mother, but she appeared to know it already.

'For love. You think he will change for love. Women have been making that mistake for aeons. You think, that because he loves you, he's going to be different.' She sat back. 'I thought that too. I thought, if I can just give him one more hug, he won't be like this anymore. If I can buy him this present, if I sing him this song, if I can make his nightmares go away, he'll love me so much that he'll change. It never happened. It won't happen for you either. Nobody changes for love, they only change for themselves, not for anyone else.'

Rey straightened her back. 'He has a different account of his childhood. There aren't many hugs in it.'

'Defending him now? You really are smitten, aren't you? I suppose he told you all that bleating rubbish about how we were neglectful parents? Did he also tell you that by the time he was five he would throw me across the room every time he had a tantrum? And this was a boy who had a lot of tantrums. We tried everything to teach him to control himself – discipline, exercise, counselling, and the credits I spent on anger management lessons. Nothing helped.

On his seventh birthday he hit me so hard he broke my arm, and his father finally agreed to let Luke train him. He wasn't safe with us, we couldn't help him. It was for his own good.'

'I don't think he sees it like that.'

Leia sighed. 'Come back and talk to me when you've had children. It's a constant stagger from one mistake to the next, nothing you do is ever good enough.'

'Most parents don't end up with sons like yours.'

'Most parent's sons can't lift X-wings with their minds.'

'True.'

'Look,' Leia rubbed her face with both hands. 'I know how this goes. When I was younger, no one could tell me anything either, I had to learn it for myself. It comes down to this – right now you have a choice. The Resistance or the First Order – the light side or the dark. Which are you going to choose?'

Rey considered that for all of a split second. 'Neither. I choose his side.'

The older woman shook her head. 'Then you're free to go. But he'll break your heart. He broke mine.'

Rey leaned forward, put a hand out. 'Thank you. I need to get back before he starts smashing things. Did you manage to find out how they were tracking you?'

Leia inclined her head. 'Tracking me?'

'Tracking you. I sent you a message using the Force when you were on Crait to tell you that the First Order had a way of tracking you, but no one else in the Resistance, and that you needed to be careful. Did you work out what it was?'

'I didn't get any message.'

The impact of it was so hard, and so sudden that Rey felt like she'd been punched. She shot upright, searching the far corners of the room for her unseen assailant, fingers itching for her lightsaber.

Leia rose from the other chair, touched her shoulder. 'I felt it too. He's here.'

PS The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available now on Amazon.

PPS Motherhood is like this.


	16. Chapter 16

There was plenty of running. Little of it had a purpose apart from to make the people doing the running feel better, but it lent the underground bunker the feel, and the smell, of panic.

Rey gazed up at a viewscreen projecting the image of the planet's orbit. She still didn't know the name of the planet, or the system, or even what its surface might look like, but all that was irrelevant since it was about to be blasted out of the sky.

She counted quickly. 'He brought the whole fleet.'

'No, they have more Star Destroyers than that.'

This was someone named Poe Dameron, one of Finn's friends, who had taken an instant dislike to her which was manifesting itself in being overly sarcastic and correcting everything she said.

'No,' replied Rey testily. 'There were ten more, but they'll have gone back to the shipyard in Kuat by now, we owe them money.'

'We?' This was Rose, one of Finn's friends, who had taken an instant dislike to her, resulting in plenty of crossed arms and frowning.

'The First Order? Big on uniforms and shouting? You'd better hope I can work out a way to stop them before they turn you into an ugly smear.'

'Just order them to stop, Supreme Leader.' This was some unnamed Resistance fighter, so unimportant he didn't even have his own jaunty jacket, who had taken an instant dislike to her because everyone else in the room had.

Rey thought quite seriously about joining the dark side, just so she'd have an excuse if she punched him in the face.

'Unfortunately, there is another,' she said.

The other Supreme Leader's voice echoed though the speakers so loudly that everyone in the room flinched. 'Give me the girl.'

Kylo Ren filled the screen, resplendent in full cowl, cloak and mask ensemble, the voice modifier cranked up from 'downright terrifying' to 'reincarnated Vader.'

'This is bad,' muttered Rey.

Leia nudged her. 'Do you want to speak to him, or shall I?'

'I'll do it.'

Dameron elbowed the General out of the way. 'Hey Ben, can I call you Ben? How've you been, buddy? Long time, no see. Rey's told me so much about you I feel like we're best friends already. You two should come over for dinner sometime. She says hi by the way.'

Through the speakers, Rey could distinctly hear the sound of a lightsaber igniting and she pushed the cocky pilot off the comms console.

Leia sat in his place. 'Ben,' she said. 'I've talked to Rey. She says you're in love and you're willing to change for her – is she right?'

The impassive face of Kylo Ren disappeared from the screen, and was replaced by the back of a chair, and the noise of a lightsaber pulverising something expensive. Hux's face swam into view, as Rey swapped seats with Leia.

'The Supreme Leader can't come on the call right now, I'm afraid he's indisposed.'

In the background, Rey could hear shouts, and the sound of blaster fire. 'Hi, General.' She waved a hand.

'Hi, Supreme Leader.'

'What's he destroying?'

Hux glanced over his shoulder. 'Looks like weapons targeting, the secondary power relay and…there goes the garbage disposal.'

She pulled a face. 'I need to get back on board, is that going to be possible?'

He took a seat. 'The Supreme Leader has been very concerned that your allegiances might have changed. I'm not sure he'd be supportive of your return, at the moment.'

'Has the Supreme Leader reviewed the surveillance footage from the officers' corridor? I'm confident it will show me being abducted.'

'He's reviewed the footage, and he's interrogated the cleaner concerned, but he remains…unconvinced.'

Rey sat back in her chair, conscious that the Resistance were eyeing her with a mixture of disgust and awe, which was a hard combination to pull off.

'Why did you bring the entire fleet? Shouldn't they be busy managing the regrouping arrangements we discussed by now?'

He inclined his head. 'They should. But the Supreme Leader was most insistent that all our forces were present to wipe out the Resistance. As always.'

'You mean he's thinking with his lightsaber and not his brain again?'

Hux quashed a smile.

'Take me off the big screen. I really need to get back on board. Can you send a shuttle for me, General? And the Resistance will need safe passage out of here.'

Hux's face disappeared from the screen with a surprised squawk.

'The Resistance will not be allowed safe passage. The Resistance will be wiped from the galaxy like the filthy scum they are. You will not be able to save them a second time.'

'Ben. Your mother's here.'

The waves of rage flowed like a thick river through her brain, but she refused to let them wash her away.

'She means nothing to me,' he intoned.

'I know that, but I'm still not going to let you kill her. I won't let you do that to yourself. If you want me back, you have to let her go.'

'What makes you think I want you back?'

She closed the comms channel with a snap. 'If you want to get out of here alive, you need to be packed up and on whatever transport you came in in fifteen minutes. I can use my access codes to disable all the weapons in the fleet, but it won't last long.'

Finn said, 'You can disable all their weapons?'

She grinned at him. 'I'm Supreme Leader of the First Order. I can do anything I like.'

Leia touched her hand. 'Will you be alright?'

She shrugged. 'Probably. Alone, unarmed, being hunted through an underground bunker by a madman in a mask. What could possibly go wrong?'

But Leia smiled, and the expression in her care-worn eyes had softened a little. 'Look after him for me.'

And then she reached into a locker and took out Rey's lightsaber, pressing it into her hands.

Rey quirked an eyebrow. 'Isn't that rather a mixed message?'

'That's just the kind of family we are.'

Finn paused once, as the rest of the rebellion was departing. 'I'll see you again, won't I? When this is over?'

She gave him an encouraging smile, although privately, she worried that the chances of this ever being over were slim. 'We're on the same side, Finn,' she said. 'Just playing for different teams. I'll see you again.'

Then she turned back to her most pressing problem and flicked open the communicator.

'If you want me, come and get me.'


	17. Chapter 17

She spent some time inside the First Order's control systems, having rightly suspected that no one would dare displease a Supreme Leader by removing their ability to log in. She set up an automatic disable command with a timer for all the Destroyers' long range weapons and removed the hyperspace tracking capability for the same amount of time.

Then she thought about where to hide. According to the bunker schematics, there was a large space on the lowest level that might contain a lightsaber battle without endangering the main infrastructure. So she turned off all the lights and headed down the stairs.

He was in her head the minute he arrived on the planet, looming dark and powerful and extremely angry in the forefront of her mind. Of course he had come, and he'd come alone because he loved an old-fashioned duel more than anyone she'd ever met.

She thought very hard about hiding in a cupboard on the ground level to the right of the entrance and when she felt him take the bait and move in that direction, continued her journey downwards, sniggering to herself about just how little training in disguising her thoughts she actually needed. She found it hard to take the whole thing seriously. He was bound to be angry, and he'd probably try the full Kylo Ren routine on her, but she was pretty sure she could cope with whatever he chose to throw at her, as long as it wasn't too heavy.

A hand came out of the darkness and pinned her to the wall. 'Don't be so sure.'

Her lungs reached for a deep breath in surprise and didn't find it, because her throat was being compressed hard enough to leave a mark. She blasted him away with a concussive shot from the Force, heard him connect with the back wall and bent over, coughing. 'A Force choke? Really?'

'You left.' His lightsaber ignited, a jagged slash across the darkness and in its baleful glare she watched him stalk her, backwards and forwards, tracking her movements.

'I was kidnapped.'

'You were rescued, you mean.'

'That isn't how I saw it.'

'That's exactly how you saw it.'

He came for her with an overhead lunge, a flailing chop at her neck when she parried the first blow, dodged the second. She frowned, no longer finding this quite so amusing.

'I saw the recording of you on Duuk. I heard it. You met him. Your pretty deserter, the one I should have tried harder to kill in the forest. You held his hand and you asked him how long it would be before you could escape.'

He came at her again, smashing into her defences with a flurry of badly coordinated blows that pushed her into a corner. She caught the last on her blade, and he pressed the advantage.

'I changed my mind,' she told him, but the words bounced off the mask. 'I didn't want to leave you.'

He backed off, tossing his helmet away. 'If I hadn't found you, you'd still be with him. Every time I turn my back, you go running off to him. Where's your loyalty now, Rey? Where's your devotion?' He spat the questions at her.

'I thought you only wanted fear.'

'Not from you.' His face was red and twisted. But despite the volume, and the aggression, she thought he sounded sad. 'From everyone else, but never from you.'

She kept her guard up. 'I did want to escape at first. I thought you were trying to control me. I thought I was a prisoner. But I changed my mind. I'd already told the Resistance I wasn't staying with them before you arrived.'

He shook his head. 'Liar. You've lied to me from the beginning. I thought you agreed to stay because you … But you've been working for them all along, haven't you?'

His jaw set, and he let fly with a volley of heavy strokes, striking as hard and as fast as he could.

She slipped, skidded backwards, held up a hand. 'Because I what?'

He saw her weakness, came running in but she kept her hand up, refusing to defend herself. He paused.

'Because I what?' she pressed. 'Say it.' Recovering her footing she took a pace forward. 'Go on. Say it.'

He stopped dead, and his throat worked but no words came out. In the flickering red and blue light, his eyes had disappeared into gaping pits of shadow.

In the end, she had to say it for him. 'You thought I agreed to stay because I was in love with you. That's it, isn't it? That's why you're so angry. Because you thought I loved you, and now you think I don't.'

She extinguished her sword, cast it to the floor, stepped forward, and kissed him, properly this time. Her arms slid from chest to shoulders and wrapped around his neck. She stretched up on tiptoes, pressing herself against his body. She put her lips to his mouth once. Then, to prove that she really meant it, Rey repeated the action until she felt him begin to soften and relax into her kiss.

'Does that answer the question?' she asked.

The fire of his lightsaber died, and the room plunged into black. His hands were on her in the darkness, skimming over her waist, and settling on her back. Large hands, capable hands, strong and reassuring.

He said, 'No.' And then, he tipped her face up to his and kissed her back.

She had forgotten about the visions. They flashed through her brain with the power of a quite explicit hurricane, hundreds of images of the two of them, doing things to each other she'd never imagined, in a range of positions she'd never seen, in a variety of seemingly unsuitable locations. She was aware that some other part of her was supposed to be doing something else, but her mind had no room for anything but sex.

He noticed eventually that she wasn't kissing him back. 'What?' There was defensiveness in his tone, a hint of embarrassment.

'Don't you see it? Us? Don't you see the visions in your head?'

He put his hands on her waist instead. 'I don't think they're visions. I don't think we've ever seen visions of the future when we touch each other. I think we just see what we want to happen, what we want to see.'

'But I don't want to see that. The one with me naked in the interrogation chair? Who would want to see that?'

'I would,' he said without shame. 'Don't tell me you've never thought about it.'

'I haven't.' She pushed away and called for her lightsaber, wondering why she'd considered it a good idea to disable all the power and get herself stuck in a basement. 'I've never thought about any of that.'

'What? Never?'

'No, never.'

He was silent for a minute, and then came back with, 'Does that mean that you've never …?'

'No,' she snapped. 'Never.' She was silent for a minute. 'Does that mean you've thought about me naked in the interrogation chair?'

'Let's get out of here,' he said.

She led the way upstairs, using her overqualified torch, kept slightly off balance by the fact that he insisted on holding her hand as if he didn't quite trust her not to run off if he let go. Coming out into bright sunshine in the middle of an abandoned city she squinted, looking around for the shuttle he'd arrived in. At that point, he did release her hand, gesturing for her to precede him up the ramp.

She gave him a look, and he shrugged. 'I think it's better that no one else knows about our … relationship.'

She rolled her eyes. 'Everyone knows, Ben. _Everyone_.'

General Hux was in the hangar bay when the shuttle docked. Ben breezed past him without a word, but Rey stopped, noting the red marks around his neck, the harried look in his eyes, and the hair unusually out of place.

'Welcome back, Supreme Leader.' He added a low bow, a fake smile, and then proceeded to follow so close behind her down the corridor his boots nearly tripped her over.

'General, can you send the fleet back to what they were doing before I was so rudely abducted?' She reached out and touched his arm. 'I'm back now, and I'm not going anywhere.'

His face sagged with relief, and as he hurried away, she snapped in her head at Ben. 'Leave him alone. He's good at his job and we need him.'

'He failed me.'

'Then demote him. Make him clean the toilets or give him a posting in the middle of nowhere where he's only in charge of carrots. But stop throttling him every time you get bored.'

Ben dismissed this with a silent wave, and she stalked past him into her old rooms.

'I'm having a shower first,' she announced. 'Somebody threw me in the garbage.'

The ruined dress became a crumpled heap on the floor, to be followed by a crumped heap in the bin. She jumped under the hot tap gratefully, washing the stink of fish from her hair.

It was some time before she realised he was watching her., But there he was, leaning against the doorframe casually watching her naked. She rushed to cover herself up, cheeks flaming, but he continued to watch, his gaze steady, his face calm, making no threatening moves—for once.

She glanced down at her partially covered chest, the hand protecting her groin and told herself sternly that she was being ridiculous. Slowly, she straightened, dropping her protection and lifting her chin, clad only in water.

It was instant, this thing between them, instant and powerful and brutally honest, and she had no need to hide anything from him, not anymore. Clearly, he took this as some sort of sign. He raised both hands to his collar, released the first button and the next and the next, until his tunic hung open and he shrugged it off. She'd seen him in this state of undress before, but that time it had been an embarrassment and this time it was something quite different. She could feel a desire to touch him tingling her fingertips, to explore the expanse of his chest, to touch him and taste him and hear him groan.

Her face grew hot and hotter still as he caught her eye and the corner of his mouth curled into a lazy smile. His hands moved to his waistband and undid the fastening. The fabric slid languorously over his thighs, grazed his calves, and ended in a tumbled pool at his feet. He'd already taken off his boots, and he stepped out of the trousers, his eyes waiting for her reaction.

She was having a reaction to watching him strip, and it manifested itself in accelerated breathing, a tightening in her stomach, and her inability to remove her eyes from his crotch.

He smiled again, turned slowly enough that she had a clear view from all sides. Then, he strode out of the room, dressed only in his underwear which, in a completely unexpected move, was black.

Rey rubbed her face hard, switched off the water, and roughly towelled her hair. She tried to remember how to breathe. Her heart raced beneath her skin, flushing it red with exertion as she glanced at herself briefly in the mirror over the sink and she licked dry lips.

Taking a fortifying breath, she tossed the towel away and walked into the bedroom after him. He hadn't made it very far, standing beside the bed with a hand that stretched out when he saw her.

'Join me' he said, and that was so close to what she'd heard back in the throne room that she reached out and took it.

My thanks to Miso for editing services. All remaining mistakes are my own.


	18. Chapter 18

She took the outstretched hand. He twined his fingers through hers, and his head lowered towards her. She worried the visions would come back, distracting her from everything else.

'Concentrate on what you're doing, and you won't see anything but me,' he murmured, breath hot on her face.

The first kiss was gentle, soft and unthreatening and gentle, just a brush of mouth on mouth. The visions were there, but she found that if she thought hard enough about his lips, the texture and the pressure and the warmth of them, they went away. He kissed her mouth open, encouraging her lips to part for him and her head to tilt back and when she was ready he deepened the kiss, the feel of his tongue against hers new and strange.

She could feel her awareness of him growing, an accompanying urge to hold him, to explore him rising from somewhere deep down, so she released his hand, and put her arms around his neck instead. The contact of her naked breasts against his chest sent a delicious shudder through her, and she stretched up further, pressed her tongue into his mouth, his heat flush against her belly.

He made a noise in the back of his throat, moving harder and faster into the kiss, hands sliding up her sides until his thumbs could caress the sides of her breasts and then racing back down again to cup her backside, hauling her against him. Without warning, she lost the sensation of skin on skin and he stepped back, his eyes flashing down her body, taking in the hardened nipples, the reddened skin, the heightened breathing.

She felt the command without him having to articulate it, sat on the edge of the bed, then pushed herself back to lay down. He stationed himself beside her, propped up on an elbow and one finger of one hand traced a path down her neck, under her right breast, lingering there while his face filled her vision and she lost herself in his kiss.

His finger continued its journey, circling around the softness of her skin until it reached the central peak, grazing it with his palm. Shivers spread outwards from his touch, and she found herself arching up into it, one knee raising. He was moving again, his hand dragging downwards across her stomach, a slow and deliberate glide which paused at the apex of her thighs.

Her belly tensed, constricted with a desire that was both excitement and trepidation, but his tongue was moving, moving against hers, her hand tangled in his hair and the more he stayed still, the more she wanted him to touch her.

She separated her legs. His hand slid down, covering the place between them and his head came up, his lips following her jawline with tiny, nipping kisses that trailed beneath her ear and extended down her chest.

She opened her eyes and watched him, his dark hair falling about his face, holding her attention with the pull of those secretive eyes. He took her nipple into his mouth and at the same time, his finger extended, pushing inside her to find the centre of her desire.

She gasped at the intrusion, the sudden friction within her softness, the instant pleasure it brought, sharp and sweet.

He watched her watching him, delicately feathering her breasts with teasing strokes and then sucking her nipple deep into his mouth with an insistent pressure. His finger worked inside her, and her breath began to come in fits and starts, a tightening in her groin coiling like a wound spring.

It was the way he regarded her that set her heart pounding though, that unbroken concentration, the seriousness with which he undertook each task, the rapt attention in his eyes. His head moved lower, kisses peppering her stomach, the tops of her legs, and he installed himself between her thighs, nudging them apart while he dipped forward, and she was left looking at only his eyes.

The kiss between her legs took her breath away. The first touch of his tongue, the soft rasp of contact, the warmth and the wetness and most of all, the knowledge that he wanted to do this for her, wanted to prostrate himself at her feet and use his mouth to bring her pleasure tipped her over the edge.

Her hips twisted, rose from the bed as she climaxed with a shout, coming down again just as quickly.

He was on her in seconds, stripping away his underwear, adjusting her position and with a single, sharp thrust, buried himself inside. She felt discomfort, unfamiliarity at the weight of him on top, the feeling of being stretched alien and awkward. He didn't move though, just stayed there, supporting himself on arms corded with muscle, looking into her eyes.

It was the first time she'd been able to touch him back. She reached out, learned the pattern of bone and sinew in his shoulders, and spread her fingers across his chest.

He seemed to take this as encouragement, tilted his hips and began to move inside her, the gentle push and pull of penetration a slow rhythm in her loins. After several minutes the aching inside her died away and his movements became less constrained, his hips working harder to withdraw and then enter her again. They moved together instinctively, and she felt the same exhilaration she'd experienced when they battled on the same side, but this was deeper somehow, a more complex connection. She didn't even need to ask him to go faster, before he did.

Sweat sheened his forehead. She wrapped her legs around his waist, locking him in. He dropped his weight on top of her, gathered her tight to his chest, pounding into her hard and fast and she gasped at the feeling that spread through her.

It wasn't orgasm, this was a different thing, a warm and a comforting thing, safe and solid and secure. She knew what it was although she'd never felt it before. Belonging. Here and now, this was where she belonged, with the powerful, vulnerable man currently climaxing inside her.

He drew in a few shuddering breaths, disengaged, and rolled over, panting.

She propped herself up beside him, mimicking his previous position and put a hand on his chest to feel the racing of his heart, wondering if it pulsed with the same emotions as hers.

He shoved a pillow under his head, raised a quizzical eyebrow. 'Well? Was that what you were expecting?'

She dropped a kiss onto the middle of his chest. It seemed to surprise him. She added another, then a third, and then, because it might be the sort of thing he'd like, she flicked her tongue at his nipple, feeling a tiny tremor and the hitch in his breathing before she did it again.

She kissed her way over his chest, learning the smell his skin had close up, the roughness of old injuries, the smoothness of scar tissue. It was a young body to have been so damaged, and an irrational urge to protect him raced though her.

The muscles in his stomach required counting; so she turned her tongue to that task and he put both hands behind his head to get a better view.

'Do you feel it too?' she asked between kisses, and she knew he'd comprehend what she meant – the connection between them, the unspoken understanding.

He shrugged. 'I've always felt it. Right from the first time we met. In fact, that time in the forest when we fought, I was trying my best not to kill you. I wanted you to win. You must have noticed.'

He reached out casually, flipped her hair to one side. She was kissing her way down a line of dark curls, which was soon to join many more.

She said, 'Liar,' and she took him in her mouth.

There was a finesse to this that she didn't yet possess, or maybe it was simply too soon, because it took several seconds of just sitting there patiently before anything stirred. Maybe she was supposed to be sucking. She tried that for a while, experimenting with various degrees of power, on just the end, on the end and a bit more, on as much as she could fit down her throat. He watched her without moving, but his face grew slowly redder and his lips were shiny with moisture.

She tried licking to see if that was any more effective, running up and down his length with her tongue, then flicking the top aggressively. He didn't appear to be able to look away from what she was doing. She got bored with the licking, ran short of ideas and felt his hand on the back of her head, urging it forward and then releasing so she could pull back. She put all the actions together, the sucking and the licking and the head bobbing, but the thing he liked most, the thing his eyes were telling her he liked most, was watching her doing that to him. She'd felt the same.

He pushed her away before she managed to get him to shout though, picking her up, spreading her legs and planting her firmly on top of him. Her eyes went wide as he slid inside her again.

She'd thought that last time he'd been deep, but this was something else. Every time he pressed upwards he rubbed against something inside her that made her whole body quiver. She slid down on top of him as he pushed up, and that almost-orgasm rippled through her again.

He licked a finger, inserted it carefully into the hot gap between her spread legs and began to rub. She forgot herself, riding the tides of pleasure with increasing abandon until the jerk and spasm of his release drove her over the edge, and she came around him with every nerve ending ablaze.


	19. Chapter 19

For the second time, Ben was there when she woke up. She almost regretted it though, because whatever problem he had with his adenoids meant that he snored loudly enough to wake most of the ship.

He looked much younger asleep, and she caught glimpses of the boy he had been in the softened lines of his face. What had it been like for him, she wondered, born into a family recognised across the galaxy, with the weight of all that expectation buckling his shoulders? No one had ever expected anything of her. If Snoke was right, and her power matched that of the man grinding respiratory gears next to her, then she was glad to be the daughter of filthy junk traders. She had no one to disappoint except herself.

The snoring abruptly ceased. His eyelids popped open, but he didn't move, just lay looking at her. 'Thank you,' he said, and she wasn't sure if he was grateful for her presence beside him, for leaving the Resistance to be with him, or simply for being.

She smiled. Ben flung back the sheet, rolled out of bed and she watched him walk naked across the room, picking up his clothes as he went.

'There's a military council meeting tonight. You're invited and all your friends.' He sounded a little awkward.

'Should we go and get breakfast first?' It was an innocent enough question, but his awkwardness grew visibly.

'I don't really…People would.' He sighed. 'You mean, are we going to start doing things together—apart from …' He waved a hand between them, 'this?' He pulled a face. 'I'm not the romantic type. Sorry.'

'I wasn't asking you on a picnic, or to bring me flowers or anything.'

He said nothing, just continued to look uneasily at her.

'So,' she said after an inelegant moment of continued silence, 'you just want us to do sex and training, is that it?'

He grinned at her, and it was the first time she'd seen him grin. 'Sex and training - now there's an idea.'

He left the bedroom, headed for her office, and she followed him, because she was curious to see how he was going to manage to get back into his own room without putting on his trousers and because she was really enjoying the sight of his naked backside. He pushed a button on her desk, and, because it was that sort of desk, a secret panel opened in the wall. He went through it and into his room. The wall slammed shut behind him, telling her definitively that, as far as he was concerned, their conversation was over.

Shaking her head, she turned back to the wardrobe and found that someone had taken the opportunity offered by her absence to throw her old clothes away. If he'd still been in her room, she would have smacked him. Haight was no longer on board and at short notice, she was going to have to choose one of the combinations in front of her.

She paused, considering. She had a whole day to fill, Ben had made it clear he wouldn't be spending any of it with her, and she had no one else left at a social level she could ask. She wasn't a prisoner anymore, and what she'd said to Finn was accurate, even if she hadn't used enough emphasis. She was Supreme Leader of the First Order, and she could damn well do what she liked.

She padded over to her desk, and, because it was that sort of desk, managed to pull up a breakdown of every planet in the vicinity, complete with assessments of defensive capabilities, population densities, natural resources and an indication of whether the First Order could conquer it or not. She pinpointed a continent that looked like it might offer what she wanted, with a temperate climate and plenty of coastline, and then she threw on a pair of shorts and a vest from the wardrobe, slung on a belted robe over the top and searched fruitlessly in the bottom for sandals.

All her life she'd dreamed of an island, but when she'd actually visited Ahch-To, it hadn't lived up to all her expectations. What was the point of growing up on a beach, after all, if you couldn't swim in the sea?

She checked out the command shuttle from the hangar bay with a smile on her face, filed a detailed flight plan so that anyone who might be inclined to worry would be reassured she wasn't off to join any form of rebellion and flew away. She found herself grinning all the way into the upper atmosphere, just at the renewed feeling of freedom, of finally being able to do exactly what she wanted without anyone around to disapprove.

She dropped the robe on the sand, left her boots on top and luxuriated in the feeling of warmth on her skin. She had been too long in the shadows. This was what she craved. This heat and this light and sand that knew its place and didn't spend the whole time trying to scour her eyes.

She tiptoed down to the sea cautiously, poking a toe in first, and finding it warm, transparent, the little ripples teasing at her skin, laughing as they kissed the shore and ran away. She splashed in with growing confidence, wetting her ankles, daring to go in up to her knees. Running along the shore, kicking at the waves, she leaped over the bigger ones, ploughed through the smaller, span in a circle and fell down, giggling.

'What do you think you're doing?'

She snapped back into awareness, sat up to find a black swathed apparition, booted, gloved and cloaked, flanked by a glittering black fighter, still ticking as its engines cooled, cluttering up her private beach.

'Having fun.' She was a trifle defensive. She had every right to be here if she wanted to.

'I don't do 'fun.''

There really was no humour in him whatsoever, she thought, but she wasn't going to let that spoil her day. 'I didn't invite you. In fact, you're not supposed to be here at all,' she replied, tartly.

'Neither are you.' He folded his arms.

'I'm the Supreme Leader of the First Order,' she replied. 'And I can do whatever I like.' She was becoming quite fond of that line, she decided, it was worth repeating more often.

'You are the Supreme Leader of the First Order,' he acknowledged that with a nod. 'And that means you can do almost nothing you like. Which includes,' his lip curled. 'Paddling.'

She looked him up and down, trying to imagine him paddling, in his full Kylo Ren get up, including the mask, and ended up snorting with laughter in a most unladylike manner.

He glowered at her.

'Anyway, I'm not just paddling, I'm training.'

He took the opportunity to look her up and down, quite pointedly. 'On a beach. Without a weapon. In completely unsuitable clothing?'

He was forever commenting on her clothes. She'd never bothered much about her appearance before she'd stepped onto The Reaper, but he always seemed to notice what she was wearing and let her know whether he approved of it or not. She glanced downwards. The vest and shorts were wet and sticking to her, but were perfectly serviceable. She couldn't see the problem.

'Yes, training. See?' She stood quickly, took the opportunity to touch her toes, stretch out her back and marked the fact that his face turned a slightly darker shade of pink. 'I wanted to practise that thing you showed me, where you attack from the air, and I thought it might hurt less if I fell in the sea rather than in the training bay. This sort of thing.'

She went into a cartwheel, attempted to come out of it with a hands-free flip, trying to get the Force to propel her higher into the air, and ended up crashing flat on her back with a tremendous splash.

He looked hesitant for a second, but he really couldn't resist telling people what to do – he liked to think of it as training, but she knew him well enough now to recognise a personality trait when she saw one. He unclipped his cloak, flung it on the sand, followed by his gloves, although he still looked hot and uncomfortable.

'Your balance is off again.'

'No, it's not.' She turned into a graceful handstand, separated her legs at the apex just to demonstrate her control. 'See?'

His face went a fetching shade of crimson, and it was only at that point that she remembered someone had disposed of all her underwear. His intense interest in her dress, or state of undress, suddenly made a lot more sense.

Jogging towards him slowly, she widened her eyes, all innocence and interest. 'If I'm doing it wrong, come in here and show me how to do it better.' She put her hands on her hips, pushing her shoulders back. She was more than aware of how the wet, cooled fabric of her vest had made her nipples pebble against it. She was also aware that he was aware.

He shifted position, pulled at the collar of his tunic. 'I'm not paddling, not for you or anyone. Try again, but you need to lift yourself with the Force at the top of your spring.'

'I think we know lifting is not my forte.' She attempted a handspring, went to turn it into a flying leap and ended up sprawled in the waves again.

He came much further forward, only a few paces from where the waves were breaking, exactly where she'd set her trap.

'I'll try again.'

She backed up in the water, ran forward into a deliberately mismanaged cartwheel and succeeded in showering him in an enormous wave, more than a little helped by a perfectly judged push with the Force.

He looked down at himself with his mouth open, dark hair plastered against his head, clothes dripping. 'Did you…do that on purpose?'

She kept her face straight, although it was extremely difficult. 'Of course not, I'm just terrible at lifting.'

She managed not to laugh for at least a couple of seconds, until a piece of seaweed dropped from his hair onto his shoulder and she couldn't hold it in. His expression darkened, like the ocean on a stormy day and she decided he'd probably killed people for less, taking off down the beach just to be on the safe side. Abruptly the sunlight grew dim and she looked back to see him standing with a hand extended, most of the sea bent by his will into a wave roughly the same height as the command shuttle and she pelted away as fast as she could run, calling out in her mind. 'Jakku isn't known for its water, Ben. I can't actually swim.'

The force of the wave crashed down on top of her like she'd accidentally run into a wall, and then she was caught by the undertow, bowled over with her head bumping against shingle and her mouth full of water. She couldn't breathe, started to panic, and then a hand grasped her upper arm and she was yanked upright and out of the water.

She pushed her hair off her face, spluttering. 'Will you ever stop overreacting?' she complained. 'I only splashed you, and here you are trying to drown me.'

He gave her a disgusted look, and she realised that she was waist deep in the sea and, judging by the way his clothes were now sticking to him, the splash had turned into a thorough soaking.

'I don't do paddling,' he snapped at her, wading towards the shore. 'And I don't do 'fun'. And I don't do romantic trips to the beach either. I thought I made that clear.'

'This isn't a romantic trip.' She grinned at his retreating back. 'This is exactly what you asked for - training and sex. That was the training bit, in case you missed it.'

He stopped so quickly they almost collided. She stepped around him, striding back to the beach. It was the work of a few minutes to find some sticks in the dunes, wedge them into the sand, and then tie her wet clothes to the top to dry in the warm breeze.

She returned to where he stood, watching and dripping in equal measure. 'Did you bring a change of clothes?'

A matted lock of hair hit him in the face as he shook his head. 'I left in a hurry.'

With mock concern, she stepped close against him, stretched out confident fingers and undid his belt. He batted her hand away.

She pursed her lips. 'You can't go back looking like that.' She knocked his hand away in turn, yanking off the belt and throwing it behind her, starting on the bottom buttons of his tunic. 'What will everyone think? It's very important to create the right impression.' She had an idea of the exact sort of impression she wanted to create.

He let her get on with undressing him, but he didn't look very pleased about it. 'Yesterday you'd never done this before, and today you're stripping me on a beach?'

'I learn quickly.' She grinned, the memory of the previous evening washing around her mind. 'It also happens that I have a very good teacher.' She jerked the fabric open and couldn't resist running a couple of possessive, and sea wrinkled hands across his chest. 'I don't know who taught you, or how recently, but only I get to take your clothes off from now on, alright?' Tugging the material off his shoulders, she caught it with a heavy slap before it hit the sand.

He shrugged, and she watched the interplay of muscle and bone that went into achieving that action with careful attention. 'You don't have much competition.'

She propped up the jacket on a couple of sticks, turned to find him hopping as he struggled to remove boots that had been tight fitting before they'd been doused in sea water, and were now moulded to him like a second skin. She helped him haul one off, and then the other, setting them aside and then moved, in a matter of fact manner, to the waistband of his trousers.

He flicked her hand away. 'I can do that myself.'

'Obviously.' She shoved her fingers between the fabric and his stomach before he anticipated the action, yanked him towards her and favoured him with her most direct stare. 'But wouldn't you rather I did it for you?'

She took a moment to remember the part of the previous evening where she'd had him in her mouth and noted the flush rising on his cheeks, the way he kept swallowing. He raised no further objection and she dropped to her knees in front of him, pulling down the dark material until it puddled, quite literally, around his ankles.

She felt it then, the power of the dark side, more strongly than it had ever manifested itself before. She bent forward, closed her lips around him and knew what it was to have complete control over another person, total mastery of their thoughts and emotions. His eyes flickered shut, chin dropping into his chest, and he groaned as she moved her mouth, gasped with every pass of her tongue, shuddered when she fisted her hand around him and pulled. Here was power that she wanted, power that had a purpose and a point, and as he surged into her mouth, calling her name loudly enough to echo back from the sand dunes she thought that this might be enough to change her allegiance.

She dropped back onto her heels when he was finished, but found it hard to meet his gaze, the black intensity within it, the restless swirl of deep emotion. He had once indicated out loud that he loved her, but now he had no need to say it, she could feel it curling around her. This was where she belonged.

She broke the moment. 'Aren't you going to teach me to swim?'

Rey waded out as far as she felt comfortable with, then let him guide her further, his perfunctory efforts to get her to move her arms and legs in the appropriate manner distracted by the more detailed attention he gave to caressing her breasts, and shocking her with the feel of warm fingertips surrounded by cool water pressing her open.

In the end she gave up on the swimming, locking her legs around his waist while he held her up, losing herself in his eyes and revelling in the tight feel of him between her legs.

The sun had begun to sink behind the horizon by the time it was over, its rays dancing a final farewell across the wings of the TIE fighter, a breeze picking up across the dunes. On the beach atop his cloak, they lay together. Ben slept on her stomach, having finally finished tonguing her through a last, lazy orgasm and then closed his eyes, satiated and at peace.

She smoothed her fingers through his hair absently, trying to undo the worst of the damage and considered that she'd finally blunted the needle of Leia's words. The older woman's advice had fallen on fertile ground, and Rey knew that she would be stupid not to cultivate it, at least for a while. It was possible that Ben's mother was right. Maybe he wasn't capable of change, but Rey had spent the day proving to her own satisfaction that when the two of them were on their own, there was nothing about him that she couldn't handle. And nothing about him not to love. Of course, there had been little in the way of conversation besides 'harder', 'faster' and 'more to the right' but she could work on that. As long as he didn't scuttle back under the beetle black carapace of Kylo Ren the minute they went back to the First Order, everything would turn out fine.

She shuffled out from beneath his sprawled limbs, trying not to disturb him and slipped on her clothes. His eyelids flickered, and he gave her that soft, shy smile as he woke.

'We'd better get back to the ship,' she said. 'The council meeting was hours ago.'

He snapped upright immediately, throwing on his uniform. 'You go back first. I'll follow, and then no one will suspect we've been together.'

'Of course.' She decided not to tell him, as she followed him through the full honour guard that Hux had obviously insisted on laying on, that his lips had been kissed into bruised red pillows, there was sunburn on his nose, a smear of sand marking his cheek, a bite on his neck where she'd got carried away, and his hair was sticking out in a dishevelled mess because she'd run her fingers through it so many times. Added to which, he hadn't been able to get his boots back on.

No one who looked at him, and there were thousands who were currently doing that, could be in any doubt whatsoever that he'd spent most of the day having sex with her on a beach, which was exactly the impression she'd been trying to create.


	20. Chapter 20

She slept long and soundly, waking alone in plenty of time for the rescheduled council meeting. The ensemble she'd be presenting for today's inspection was close-fitting trousers and a long-sleeved tunic, although she found the sleeves so restrictive that she couldn't move her back properly and the high-necked collar was much too tight. She unbuttoned the throat until she could bend forward without throttling herself, pulled on the tall leather boots, and put her hair up before heading for the office next door.

Someone had put a large table in it and around the table sat faces she recognised. Ben was at the far end, chin on fist, glowering, surrounded by various generals. Although, now that she was paying attention, there seemed to be a lot fewer of them than there had been last time. There was an empty seat at the opposite end, closest to the door, and near it sat Captain Ocram, Major Breen, and Lieutenant Vanya, all of whom looked nervous. Captain Matandari didn't seem to be able to remove the substance stick from her mouth.

Everyone in the room stood, and saluted her with a smart 'Supreme Leader.'

In her head Ben said, 'I like that outfit.'

'Is that flattery?'

'No, that's lust.'

She would have raised an eyebrow if she hadn't been trying so hard to look serious.

One of the generals kicked off with some kind of situation report, detailing how the First Order's retreat was going, except that he didn't call it a retreat. Instead, he attempted to use lots of euphemisms which amounted to the same thing. Rey lost interest around half an hour in, somewhere in the middle of the troop manoeuvres in the vicinity of Novena Prime, drifting off into a consideration of the man at the other end of the table.

What might it be like, she wondered, to have sex with him as he was right now – distant, disapproving, dominating – rather than the man on the beach yesterday, whom she had stripped of his clothes and his control, and who had left her embrace looking thoroughly spent. She must be at least slightly attracted to this version of him, the dark and menacing one, and she lost herself in some delicious fantasies about how all that dark and menacing might translate to the bedroom, later tonight.

'Concentrate,' Ben snapped in her head.

She jumped, earning a curious look from Captain Matandari next to her. Rey narrowed her eyes at him across the length of the table. 'Did you throw my clothes away?' she demanded silently.

'Rags. I had someone throw those rags away.'

'Well, you threw away my underwear as well. I'm not wearing anything underneath this.' She gave him a challenging look. 'Concentrate on that.'

His eyes darkened, and he shifted a little in his chair.

Eventually, the military reports appeared to be over and attention switched to her end of the table.

Captain Ocram began. 'We've had a request to join the alliance from the moon of Duuk. They're offering ten percent of their revenues. In return, they are asking for our help to destroy the pleasure planets of Markas Three.'

There was much excitement at this from the other end of the table.

'Permission to blast Markas Three out of the sky, Supreme Leader?' a new and particularly keen general requested.

'You don't, by any chance, happen to have any more of those big, round guns things hanging about, do you? The ones the size of a small moon?' she asked, just checking.

'Sadly not, Supreme Leader.' Hux shook his head.

'Then let's get onto whoever leads Markas Three and tell them we're planning to declare war at the request of the new allies of the First Order – see what they say.' She nodded at Ben. 'You're the scary one. You do it.' She waved at his face. 'Better put the mask on.'

She concentrated on the first time she'd seen that mask close up, when she'd been strapped in the interrogation chair, almost completely at his mercy, and then added to that memory a vision of what might have happened if she had been then as she had been yesterday, completely naked apart from the sun. He said absolutely nothing, but in a very indecent way.

He stalked across to his desk, and, because it was that sort of desk, a large viewscreen slid noiselessly out of the middle of it. He flicked a switch.

'Put me through to Markas Three.' He spent a few seconds composing himself in the chair, yanking the cowl into a rakish slant.

'That's much more terrifying,' she said into his head. She suspected he was giving her a foul look, but since he had the helmet on, she couldn't be sure.

'Attention Markas Three. This is Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order. Our allies, the moon of Duuk, in conjunction with the armies of the First Order, intend to declare war upon your planet. You have thirty minutes to respond.' He cut the signal and removed his helmet. 'Now what?'

'Now we blast them out of the sky!' The new, keen general almost bounced in his chair.

She glanced at Captain Ocram. 'Menan, can you follow that up by broadcasting the proclamation where we asked for allies, please?'

'Of course, Supreme Leader. Then we wait?' He followed the direction of her thoughts, as always. For a brief second, she wondered just how sensitive to the Force he was.

There wasn't long to wait.

The sibilant tones of the Markas Three prime minister hissed through the speaker. 'Attention Firsssst Order. Markassss Three wishessss to join your allianccccce. We accccept your termsssss.'

Rey, who'd had about enough of the spitting, indicated for someone to kill the sound.

'Now we blast them out of the sky?' the new general queried, uncertainly.

'No. Now, we tell them that they can join the alliance, as long as they accept our additional terms, which are that they release all the slaves they are currently holding and only staff their business in future with paid employees, who are there of their own free will. And better tell them they'll be subject to regular inspections. Send that message back, and tell the Chief Haggler of Duuk what we've done.'

Captain Ocram tapped away at his screen for a while. The ping of the response came back almost immediately.

'Markas Three will comply with those terms, on condition that we don't blast them out of the sky. And the Chief Haggler is delighted that he's getting all his citizens back.'

She turned to address the other end of the table. 'Gentlemen, what's your priority? Ships, weapons, transport, or staff? What do you need?'

'A big, round gun the size of a small moon?'

She favoured the new general with a withering stare. 'General Hux?'

'Weapons,' he chose.

'Lieutenant Vanya, we've got some money coming in now. Half of it goes on finding somewhere to build a weapons factory and with the other half, let's get General Hux some guns.'

'I can get a really good deal from Sonn-Blas actually,' she answered. 'Since I told them we weren't going to buy from them, they've stopped the union dispute and they're offering us much better prices than they were before.'

Rey shook her head. 'Not them. Place an order somewhere else. We need to teach our suppliers a little respect.'

'Supreme Leader?' Captain Ocram interrupted with a polite cough. 'I'm afraid the Azaxi homeworld has just declared war on us because we've wiped out the slave trade on Markas Three and they've lost their biggest customer. How would you like to respond?'

Rey pointed at the new general. 'You. You're up.'

He thought for a minute. 'Can we blast them outof the sky?'

'Exactly.'

Ben interrupted before anything else could be said. 'And I think that means this meeting is over. The First Order is at war, and everyone's happy. Prepare for an assault, General Hux.' The scarier Supreme Leader stayed seated while everyone else stood to leave, Rey included, until a gloved finger pointed her back to her chair. 'Not you.'

She remained standing. The door closed on the last general, and she was alone with the Supreme Leader, who was staring at her with what she now thought of as his Supreme Leader's face, humourless and hard.

'Why is it,' he asked, pushing back from the table and approaching her position with a heavy, determined tread. 'That every time we're in company I feel like you're in control?' He'd reached her now, and before she thought to stop him, had undone the first fastened button on her tunic. 'Whereas you and I both know…' The buttons flew apart, revealing her bare breasts. 'That you're not.'

The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available on Amazon.


	21. Chapter 21

Her mouth went dry. She thought about backing away but a part of her, a part suddenly warm and wet and willing, wanted to see where he was going with this. He stretched out a hand, took her left nipple between his leather clad fingers and pinched it. She gasped in shock and then again in mild pain as he flicked at the same spot, her flesh bouncing away from his touch. She drew a shuddering breath, but he simply grabbed at her other breast, hard enough to leave a red handprint when he let go. She felt a rush of heat between her legs, put out a hand to touch him and he smacked it away.

'Keep still.' There was an authority in his tone that he didn't usually bother deploying with her, but her heart was racing so fast by now she decided to let him get away with it, just this once.

His fingers unhooked the catch on her trousers, tugged them down to the tops of her boots, trapping her legs. He simply stared at her nakedness without commenting, and a blush rose on her skin, her nipples hard with arousal. Straightening, he paced around her slowly and she felt his eyes on her all the way.

Then a hand on her back pushed her forward onto the table and she had to catch herself quickly on her elbows, as two hands, two gloved hands separated her thighs. She bit down on her lip, hard, seeing her reflection do the same thing in the shiny table top, and then his fingers were on that special spot between her legs, all leather and rubbing. The pleasure was so intense it burnt its way through her synapses, tightening muscles, shooting sparks behind her eyes. She struggled to breathe through it and then there was something else to concentrate on, his fingers entering her, lots of his mercifully ungloved fingers pushing inside her, testing, stretching, pulling back and rushing in again.

The wet noises her body made as he played it filled the room until the rustle of fabric replaced them, and she braced herself. She couldn't stretch her legs very far apart and when he made his determined entrance, the contact was so tight, the penetration so deep she felt every inch of him inside her, every thrust, every drive.

His fingers bit into the soft flesh of her hips, forcing her back onto his hardness and she thought she would come then, except that he snapped, 'Don't you dare.'

She couldn't see his face, only feel the control he had over her, riding her as forcefully as he wanted, the slap of his body against her when he rammed home, the emptiness when he pulled back. She closed her eyes and surrendered to it, her head down, breasts hitting the table, sweat on her back and fire between her legs.

He leaned over her, hissing in her ear, 'Come now, but don't make a sound.'

She stuffed her hand into her mouth as the orgasm wrenched its way out of her and she felt him come hard into her on a final stroke. He withdrew immediately, fumbled with his trousers and marched back to his bedroom without another word, slamming the door.

She collapsed onto the table, sticky wetness dribbling down her thighs, elbows scraped raw, her hair hanging loose.

'Don't think about it, if you don't want me to do it,' he advised in her mind. 'And don't flounce around my office without your underwear being beautiful and in control or you'll find yourself bent over the table a lot more often.'

'I'm not sure that was flattery.' She was out of breath, even in her mind.

'No, that was lust,' he repeated. 'It happens every time I look at you. If we spent any more time in each other's company, the majority of it would be me just taking your clothes off.'

'That doesn't sound too bad.'

'It would get tedious after a while, I'd imagine. You'd get bored.'

'So, you don't want to spend time with me because you think you're boring?'

There was a pause, long enough for her to stand up and start straightening the kinks out of her back.

'I don't do small talk,' he warned.

'You're managing well enough now.'

'I mean it, Rey. I don't do any of it. I'm Supreme Leader of the First Order, there's no time in that life for romantic trips or weddings or children or running away and setting up home together in the back end of nowhere where no one can find us. None of that is going to happen.'

She pulled up her trousers and refastened the tunic. 'Well, if all you're offering is sex and training, then I'm not going to stay. I don't want much, just a little of your time. Let's try it out, shall we? Give me a few minutes, and I'll come with you to whatever you're doing next.'

'You'd be bored. It's just a regular troop inspection - I turn up and make an example of a few of them. It improves their motivation.'

'Wait for me to get changed then. I can't go like this, or everyone will know what we've just been doing.'

'After yesterday, everyone knows, Rey. Everyone. Even the new cleaner was congratulating me this morning.' He reappeared from the bedroom, eyeing her critically, the post coital flush, the mussed hair, the buttons missing from her top. 'Besides, I think I prefer you like this,' he said out loud.

He was right though; his conversational skills were dreadful. As soon as they'd arrived in the drill hall, he disappeared off amongst the ranks of stormtroopers, berating one or the other for the state of their uniform, bringing a third to his knees coughing for some minor misdemeanour, being frightening in a low key, black suited, sinister kind of way.

He was right about something else as well, even though he'd said it as part of a lust-fuelled sex session. The relationship they had on their own was different to the one they had in company. She moved up and down the rows, complimenting a soldier on the shininess of his armour, listening to thoughts on the new duty rosters, and asking for opinions on the functionality of the replacement blasters on order.

Hux trailed her, a pale ginger shadow.

It was because Ben was different with her than he was with everyone else. With her, he'd already changed. With her, he'd been different since that night by the fire on Ahch-To, but here, here in the midst of the First Order, he was exactly who they'd always expected him to be. He couldn't be Ben here. He was trapped. That was why he clung to the mask, why he prized fear above loyalty, why the minute she was off the ship, he'd decimated the cadre of generals and lost all perspective in bringing the entire fleet to retrieve her. This was his identity – Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader, master of the dark side and Lord of the Sith, homicidal megalomaniac. He'd asked her to let the past die, but he simply couldn't manage it himself. He hung on to Kylo Ren no matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried to show him a different path or demonstrate how much she loved Ben Solo.

He was never going to change.

A stormtrooper flew through the air, hit a wall and collapsed onto the floor.

He was never going to change as long as he was here.

She allowed Hux to catch her up, saw him wince as another solider was elevated towards the ceiling. The General caught her eye and held it and a moment of understanding passed between them.

If he was never going to change as long as he was here, he'd have to leave.


	22. Chapter 22

The next day, Rey and the First Order went to war.

'Don't leaders usually stand at the back?' She had to flick a switch on the open-topped, lightly-armoured, ground assault vehicle she was travelling in so she could ask this question of General Hux, who was somewhere at the back.

The Azaxi's outer defences had been breached some time ago, and the First Order armies had landed, departed their transports, and were marching towards what should be a relatively easy victory. Rey had already had Major Breen transfer the majority of the Azaxi assets to the First Order coffers, and the plan today was to defeat the pigmen, assert the First Order's military supremacy to anyone who might be tempted to declare war, and then accept the surrender of the surviving Azaxi forces and leave them to rebuild their planet in peace. The only part Rey didn't understand was why she had to go to the battle at all, especially not in what was basically a lidless metal box.

Hux responded, 'Sometimes, it's wise to let the troops see their leaders in combat. It stiffens their resolve.'

It was obvious that Ben wasn't too keen on her stiffening anyone's anything, because he was prowling alongside her transport, brandishing his lightsaber at anyone who dared get too close. The transport only stopped when it was about to crash into the front lines and she got down, a shade nervously, igniting the lightsaber, just in case.

'Remind me what we're doing here?' she asked.

He gestured, and a space appeared in the First Order lines, which he stepped in to fill, deflecting the first blaster shots and advancing towards the enemy.

'First, if you're prepared to order the attack, you should be prepared to lead the attack. Second, Hux thinks the army needs to see you in action if they're going to accept your authority and I think he has a point. And third, you wanted a picnic. So, are you going to come and help or are you going to stand around with the sandwiches all day?'

She went to help. Fighting with him was almost as good as sex with him, and she found herself thinking about both things at the same time, and then rather more about the sex, preferring to disable rather than kill Azaxi soldiers now that the battle seemed to be over. He didn't take the bait though and, losing interest, she climbed back into the transport to survey the battlefield with more height.

'It's over, Ben,' she told him, although she'd lost sight of him somewhere in the midst of the fighting. 'They're retreating. Will Hux give the order to fall back?'

'No. I'll give the order to move on to the settlements. They should be easy to eliminate.'

She took a step backwards in shock, the pit of her stomach falling into a hole somewhere. 'That wasn't the plan. We're going to leave the women and children alive. They're innocent in all this.'

He snorted. 'The First Order doesn't leave survivors to recover and attack us again. And besides, these people aren't innocent. They sell children to rape parties. Whether they've done it themselves or it's been done in their name, they are responsible for terrible things. They're long past your forgiveness.'

She answered slowly. 'That doesn't mean you should slaughter them. There are some things that can't be forgiven, but I don't think that killing the culprit is the answer. I think people should be allowed to make amends, if they really want to change.'

'Me or them?' he snapped. 'Because last time we fought these people you had no ethical concerns whatsoever.'

'You don't need to kill everyone you meet just to prove a point. Leave the women and children alone.'

'Stop it, Rey. Just stop it. Stop trying to control me. Stop trying to change me. This is who I am.'

'No. This isn't who you are. This is Kylo Ren.'

'Here and now, Kylo Ren is who I am. Who I will always be. I'm sorry if that isn't good enough for you, but it's never going to change.'

'I know I can't change you Ben. You've made that perfectly clear.' She was glad that he was too far away to see the single tear that escaped down her cheek.

She took the command shuttle, with its dented nose and badly repaired wing and flew back to The Reaper without him. But he knocked on the door of her suite later. When she opened it, he took her in his arms, placing a kiss on the top of her head.

'I'm sorry for shouting at you,' he said.

'But not sorry for murdering innocent people?'

He sighed. 'Do we have to do this now? Can't we just pretend, just for an hour or two, that I'm the person you want me to be?'

She accepted the truce, lying with him on her bed for the rest of the afternoon, listening to him breathe, but her jaw was clenched the entire time. She couldn't let it go, not as easily as that. It was possible that he didn't see the consequences of his actions – it was possible that, if she was a little more direct with him, maybe he'd understand. If he loved her enough, he'd change. Surely, he would change. He needed one more chance. This was a mistake, an aberration, just a stumble on the road to redemption. She could give him one more chance, just one more.

Captain Ocram sent an emergency call through to her holopad just as her eyes were flickering shut. 'Apologies for the interruption, Supreme Leaders. I have a situation that requires your attention. Two further requests to join the alliance have arrived, but both planets are demanding that we destroy the other. What would you like me to do?'

She called from the bedroom. 'Is there an obvious answer, Menan?'

'No, Supreme Leader. This is politics, not war. There aren't any easy answers.'

She sighed, thought for a minute. 'Then I'd better speak to them both. Set it up.'

She rolled back to Ben, clambered onto his chest and kissed him, pulling the lower lip that had been pouting for the best part of the last three hours into her mouth. 'Are you coming?'

He slid a hand into her hair, cupping the nape of her neck and put his mouth to hers as lightly as ever the first ray of sun had danced across her face on a Jakku morning. He covered her face in tiny, butterfly soft kisses, tracking the contours of her cheekbones with a whispering attention and returning to her mouth only when the rest of her had been thoroughly explored.

'No,' he finally said. 'And you don't need to go either. We don't need allies.'

He rolled her over, coming to rest on top and she separated her legs automatically, hooking an ankle over his calf. His hips rocked against her, hard against soft, firm into yielding. She reached up and unfasted the small buttons holding his tunic closed, pushing it back off his shoulders until he shrugged it to the floor.

'We do if we want to survive.' She loved this bit. The licence she had to strip him naked, the way she could touch and kiss him in any way she wanted, that no one else could.

He kneeled up, took the hem of her top and tugged it over her head. Then he bent his mouth to her breast. 'You're so naïve. Everyone is going along with what you want because the army's in trouble, and you've got a good plan to fix it. But as soon as we're secure again, everything will change.'

He ceased the circling ministrations of his tongue, took a nipple between his teeth and pulled back, releasing it gently, then suckled hard enough on her other breast to make her moan, and wind her fingers into his hair to hold him in place.

He broke away, reaching for the catch on his trousers. 'We won't need allies any more. We'll overrun them. We'll take what we want, and they'll be grateful we didn't take more.'

Rey wriggled out of her trousers as he sprang himself free and he spread her open, putting a hand between her legs. 'That's not how it's going to be,' she gasped, two fingers sliding smoothly inside her. She wrapped her hand around him, feeling him harden still further under her touch. 'Nothing stays conquered forever, not in the end. That's why the Empire failed. That's why the First Order has to adapt.'

He entered her gently, her hands running up and down his spine, feeling the movement of his backside beneath her nails. She moaned at the bite of his teeth at the base of her neck.

He said, 'You want to adapt it into the Republic.'

She crossed her legs over his hips, matching the long, rhythmic drives, the sudden retreats, urging him deeper with lips and hands and body. 'There is no Republic,' she whispered into his ear. 'There is no Empire. Both failed. Both fell. Let them die. Build something new with me.'

She wanted him to accept. She held him while he shuddered under her hands, and he held her as she came apart around him, but she wanted him to understand what she was saying because this would be the last chance he was going to get.

He spent himself inside her with a long-held groan. Rolling away, he rested an arm over his eyes as he fought to catch his breath. 'We'll see,' he said.

She put her clothes back on and went out.


	23. Chapter 23

Rey had a headache by the time her day was over, which was in the early hours of the following morning. Most of the night had been spent thrashing out a deal that both new members of the alliance could live with, a deal helped by the superb negotiation skills of Lieutenant Vanya and Captain Ocram's seasoned wisdom. Nevertheless, Rey felt drained and retreated to her empty bed to sleep, waking the next afternoon with another call from the military council, enquiring as to why she was late.

She wanted very much to walk away from the whole sorry exercise, the inevitable confrontation which had been looming since she'd first stepped on board the ship, months ago, but instead, she slung something on from the wardrobe and went next door.

The tension in the room was palpable, mostly because the keen, new general was pinned to the wall breathing his last. She flicked him loose without bothering to ask what he'd done.

Ben glared at her from the other end of the table as she seated herself. 'I didn't like his report,' he explained.

Captain Ocram shuffled his papers to cover the fact that he was favouring her with a very long, and a very direct stare, with more than a hint of sympathy in it.

'I'm next on the agenda. I'm pleased to say we have fifty-seven requests to join the First Order's alliance, and I'm expecting the overall number to have reached two hundred by the end of the week. Each system has submitted its list of conditions for our approval. How would you like to proceed?'

Rey groaned. 'I can't go through another meeting like yesterday's again. They'll just have to all come in together and sort it out at the same time.'

Captain Ocram asked carefully, 'You'd like representatives of all these systems to gather at the same time and agree how they can work together and with us?'

'That's not such a stupid idea, is it? The logistics would be a problem, of course. We'd need to find a really big room somewhere and then have a way to stop them all shouting over each other at once, but it might work. With two hundred planets in the alliance, we can build all the ships we want, invest in training, and expand the army.'

'And what will your army do as part of this new alliance, Rey?' Ben's words were innocuous, but the tone was sharp.

She shot him a look. 'It's Armitage's army, not mine. But I think they'll protect our allies from our enemies, and each other, they'll police the systems and tackle the crime syndicates, their strength will deter attacks on us and with them we can expand our reach, if we need to.'

'For what purpose?'

She frowned at that. 'I've asked myself the same question. You say the purpose of the First Order is to remove the disorder from existence, to provide stability and promote progress. I can see a way to achieve that and we're on the way there. But I've never understood the next bit. Once we have power, what do we do with it then?' She shrugged. 'Change things for the better, I suppose.'

Ben tightened his fist on the table. 'It's quite clear to me what you want power for, Rey. In fact, it's clear to me why you were so keen to accept when I asked you to join me in the first place. It isn't just me you want to change, it's the entire Order. You're bringing back the Republic. All these "allies" and this council sitting around chatting about what to do and the army reduced to a peace keeping force? You're never happy with things just as they are, are you? Nothing is ever good enough.' He stabbed a finger at the table. 'This experiment stops, and it stops now. The First Order is a regime, it's a belief system, a way of life. You can't walk in here and expect all that to change just because of you.'

Simmering anger bubbled under the calm surface of his face, long held grievances coming to the fore which had nothing to do with politics.

'This isn't about the First Order, Ben. It's about you and me. It's always just been about you and me. But I agree. Change doesn't happen unless you want it to. And sometimes, it doesn't happen unless you force it.'

She broke eye contact then and slowly ran her attention around the other occupants of the room, the majority of whom were glancing backwards and forwards between the two black clad figures at either end of the table.

She took a deep breath. 'Join me. If you want change, stand with me.'

But it wasn't Ben she was addressing this time. It took him a minute to realise that, a denial already halfway out of his mouth before he paused, then rose to his feet, a looming shade of past nightmares. 'But if you believe in the First Order, if you love it as it is—like I do—then you'll stand with me.'

The room hushed, and although she knew that somewhere the engines were turning, and people were hurrying about their daily lives, in this room silence reigned. A sudden clatter broke the moment as the new, keen general hastened from Ben's side of the table to stand behind Rey.

'You're choosing her?' Ben sounded incredulous. 'Why?'

'Because the life expectancy in my job is three weeks since you've been in charge,' the man shot back. Then, seemingly stunned by his own temerity, he hid behind her chair.

Captain Ocram got to his feet, as she knew he would, came to stand at her back. 'Because she asked about the point of power.'

Lieutenant Vanya jumped to her feet. 'Because she listened to me.'

Major Breen was behind her a second later. 'Because she looked at the detail.'

Captain Matandari said nothing, simply flicking her substance stick in a supportive manner.

A second general, whose name she didn't know and whose face she didn't recognise, got to his feet. 'Because I've seen her fight.'

But General Hux sat at the far end of the table, flanked by his remaining colleagues, saying nothing, and Rey knew that without him, this gamble would never pay off.

He was perfectly still for another few seconds, and when he did speak, she had the impression he'd been rehearsing the words for a very long time.

'The army is the First Order. We made it. We built it from scratch in the Unknown Regions from the ashes of the Empire, and it took effort. It took work. An army is not just a collection of men and machinery. It's as you say,' he nodded at Ben. 'A belief system, a way of life. And a purpose.'

His eyes narrowed as he continued, 'But the only purpose that the Sith have ever given it is your own. You, and Snoke before you, and Vader and Palpatine, you're all the same. Expending thousands of men on your own grandiose schemes. Pursuing the Jedi down to the very last one, chasing the Resistance off a cliff without a thought for the consequences. You let both our Dreadnaughts be destroyed, you lost us Starkiller Base, wiped out more of your own troops than theirs in the process, and you brought us to the edge of ruin.'

He pushed back his chair with a sharp snap and stood, glaring at Ben. 'I love the First Order. But I'll stand with her because the Order is not your plaything.' He strode to Rey's side, trailed by the remaining generals. 'And neither am I.'

The expression on Ben's face was uncomprehending for a split second, but she knew it would quickly move to anger. He hadn't seen this coming. He hadn't realised over the last few weeks, the extent to which the balance of power between the two Supreme Leaders had shifted.

She might not be Rey of Jakku any more, or Rey of the Jedi, or even Rey of the Resistance, and her clothes might be black and the glint in her eye a shade more menacing, but she hadn't changed who she was, not for love and not for anything. In loving him, she didn't want to become more like him. There was no question that he would be allowed to wipe out settlements, slaughter women and children, torture his staff, murder and maim and kill with impunity while she was around. Nobody changes for love, not that much, as any concerned uncle or father figure could have told him. And she wasn't a nobody anymore, she wasn't nothing. She had written her own place in this story, and now she was Rey of the First Order, Supreme Leader.

The fury she predicted didn't come. Instead, his face appeared to collapse in on itself, leaving him looking hurt and vulnerable, rather than terrifyingly enraged. That impulse to protect him surged through her again, stinging her sore heart.

'And you?' he asked softly. 'Why are you doing this?'

She steeled herself against the tears. 'You were the one who knew the visions we had were wish fulfilment Ben, not real. That very first one, back at the fire on the island where you thought I would turn – you always knew that wasn't true. You knew I was never going to change, but you asked me to join you anyway. I've thought a lot about why, and it comes down to this. You see, 'join me' wasn't what I heard. It wasn't what you were really asking. You didn't just want me to join you Ben. You wanted me to save you. And that's what I'm going to do.'

She took a step forward, held out her hand. 'Let it go. Let it all die. The Sith, the Jedi, the dark side, the light, Kylo Ren, your past. Start again. Become who you want to be, not what everyone else expects.'

It was now or never, and she'd never been more afraid.

'Join me.' She swallowed hard, and her hand shook, wanting so badly for him to take it that her voice cracked into a ruined whisper. 'Please.'


	24. Chapter 24

The brutal slash of the red lightsaber igniting was the only answer.

There was a sudden rush for blasters, which appeared from the pockets of nearly everyone in the room. Hux attempting to juggle at least three from his own personal armoury. Rey knew Ben was good in battle, but it was unlikely he was going to be able to stop every single one of them simultaneously.

She gestured, and the conference table soared upwards, knocking down the First Order insignia as it flew through the air and crashed into the desk which, because it was that sort of desk, promptly exploded as the hidden weapons within it detonated in a shower of splinters.

She stepped out of the way, leaving him a clear line to the door. 'Then you can either choose to kill me, or leave. I won't fight you.'

He had no such qualms, holding the blade at her throat, but she knew he wouldn't do it. He loved her too much, and too deeply, that love a clarion call to the light that had constantly ripped him apart. She knew he loved her, it was laid bare and bleeding in those dark eyes as he stood there, poised for a stroke he would never deliver.

She said, in words that only he would hear, 'I love you.'

He froze. 'No,' His voice was an acid hiss. 'No, no you don't. I accepted you for who you were from the beginning. I asked you to join me. I made you my equal. I defended you. I've spent the last few months turning my life upside down just to get you what you want.' He switched off the sword, and the room fell into a thick silence. 'But you've tried to change me since the day we met and now here we are. If I won't become exactly what you want, I have to leave? If I won't change everything I am and become your pet like everyone else in this room, you'll ask them to fire on me? You know I won't kill you. You're counting on it. I love you, and you've taken that, the one good thing I had left and used it against me. That's the dark side, Rey. That's what it does.' His eyes were shot full of pain, and he looked at her as if he'd never seen her before in his life. 'Not every monster wears a mask.'

Then he was gone, walking away, walking past her, walking out of her life. She had set him free at last, but the cost of it was too much to bear. Menan Ocram's hand fastened on her shoulder, and she braced herself against a chair.

Tension trickled out of the room in an assortment of sighs, and sagging shoulders, holstered blasters and muttered comments.

Then a voice crackled into life from a speaker in the ceiling. 'General Hux. You asked to be informed of the Supreme Leader's movements. He has taken the command shuttle, heading unknown. Shall I contact him for you?'

Rey glanced over. 'Let him go.'

Hux responded, 'No further action.'

However, a couple of seconds later the disembodied voice was back again. 'General, the shuttle has turned and is approaching The Reaper. At some speed.'

'I'm on my way.'

The rest of the council was also on its way, Rey dragging behind as she broadened her awareness of the Force outside the ship. There was the anger she'd expected, the volcanic rage exploding through space towards her, powered by ion engines and a lifetime of disappointment. He thought she was another in a long line of people who had betrayed him, tried to change him. He didn't understand she was trying to give him space in order to change himself.

She'd never bothered with the command deck of The Reaper before, and now she was there, the whole thing felt alien and uncomfortable, full of incomprehensible noises and urgently flashing lights. She was conscious of the crew staring at her from their entrenched positions, faces glowing in the artificial darkness, and she wished for someone to stand at her side so she wouldn't feel so alone.

'He's on a collision course,' one of the uniformed officers noted, as if it was irrelevant. 'Direct impact with the bridge estimated in ninety seconds.'

'What's he doing?' Hux asked her with a raised eyebrow.

She wrapped her arms around herself. 'He doesn't have anything left. He alienated himself from his family, and I pushed him out of the First Order. He has nowhere else to go.'

'Permission to fire on the shuttle, sir?' The officer spoke as if this was all simply a military exercise, and Rey felt her temper flare.

'I don't expect fear from your army, General Hux,' she bit out. 'But I do expect their loyalty. The man on that ship is your Supreme Leader.'

'Don't shoot.' Hux gave the order, but he sounded unconvinced.

'Thirty seconds to impact.'

Rey found herself counting down in her head. Ben would pull up. He would realise that she was doing this because she loved him, because he'd asked her to let the past die but hadn't been able to let it go himself. Any second now, he'd pull up.

'He wants me to fire on him,' she murmured. 'He wants me to prove I'm a monster.'

There was no place for Kylo Ren in her First Order, or anywhere. He was part of the past. Ben Solo was going to have to let that part of him go and work out who he was meant to be.

'Twenty seconds to impact.'

'How many Azaxi women and children did he kill in the settlements yesterday?' she asked suddenly, hoping that the numbers might take away the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and replace it with self-righteousness.

Hux gave her a quizzical stare. 'None. He came back not long after you did. The settlements were not destroyed. That was never the plan.'

'Ten seconds to impact.'

He wasn't going to pull up. She was going to have to save him from himself. Darkness rises and light to meet it, she thought. I can do anything he can do. But she'd never been any good at lifting.

She reached out for the shuttle, trying to visualise it as more than a lump of extremely heavy, extremely fast metal, hurtling towards impact. The man inside it was nothing, not anymore, except to her, and she concentrated on that. It wasn't a ship she was trying to lift, just a single ordinary, precious human being, and that tipped the balance. Her power flung the ship up and away and she couldn't tell how far or how fast it might travel, or where it might end up when it finally stopped. All she knew was that the presence she'd carried around in her mind for months had gone, and she was truly alone.

A couple of the bridge crew swivelled in their chairs to stare at her, but Captain Ocram's hand beneath her elbow tugged her away.

'I need to show you a possible venue for our meeting with the fifty-seven delegates if you don't mind, Supreme Leader. I think it's large enough, but you may want to think about the layout.'

He continued to chatter inane nonsense at her until they were off the bridge and had navigated a couple of corridors, studiously ignoring the steady stream of tears and tugging her onto a circular expanse of polished floor, in the middle of which sat a single, very large chair.

She was caught out by that. 'But – this is a throne room?'

'Of course it is. The Reaper has been the flagship of the fleet since you came on board, but you've never shown any inclination to use it, and now I think this room will become useful. It has enough space to accommodate representatives from every potential ally, and if you control the meeting from there,' he nodded at the throne. 'They'll all be able to see and hear you.'

'You want me to sit on the throne?' she asked, amazed that he'd even suggest such a thing.

'Not necessarily sit on it. Stand by it, if you want to. Stand on it. But find a way to make all the people who are coming listen to you, or this alliance will be over before it's begun, and everything you've just done.' Here his hand fastened on her arm. 'Will be for nothing.'

She worried about it all night, and that worry helped camouflage the fact that both her bed and her heart were cold and empty. There was no one to talk to about any of it, how to assert her authority without going too far, how to build consensus without appearing weak. She'd never done any of it before. Power had always been Ben's world, not hers.

She stood in front of the wardrobe doors for a very long time the next morning before she could muster the will to put it on. That dress had been hanging in in the closet since she'd arrived, the high necked, long sleeved, full skirted, hooded Supreme Leader's robes, too much like something he would wear for her to choose. She needed to be taken seriously though, and she needed respect, if she was going to achieve everything she wanted.

Rey surveyed herself in the mirror afterwards, booted and belted with the lightsaber at her waist and her hair covered by the cowl. She was sure that wherever he was, Ben would have approved.

She strode through the throng of milling delegates and seated herself on the throne as if she'd been born to it. 'I am Rey, Supreme Leader of the First Order,' she declared.


	25. Chapter 25

For six months, the galaxy changed around her, but she was too busy to notice.

From morning until night, her days were packed with council meetings of various kinds, planning sessions, military exercises, troop inspections, official visits, and parades. She opened new shipyards and commissioned the first of the new Dreadnaughts, which would become mobile repair bays for the expanded Star Destroyer fleet, ensuring both flexibility and self-reliance. She toured weapons factories, armour manufacturing sites, uniform assembly lines, all staffed with properly paid employees from various systems across the alliance. She supervised Captain Matandari's redesign of the stormtrooper training programme, spent a lot of time in the drill yards and down in the hangar bay just talking to her staff.

She tried to demonstrate to anyone who might be watching that she wasn't a monster.

Rey chaired the alliance, which was still expanding after the initial push, set up a regular series of meetings with a standing agenda, and when she was sure it wouldn't fall over, rotated chairing the meetings around each of her allies in turn, giving them all a chance to sit on the throne. Once, just once, she sensed a familiar presence in the chamber, sought it out until she found Leia's eyes watching her, heavily disguised under a mask. The older woman gave her a nod, but whether it was acknowledgement or approval, Rey couldn't be sure. She didn't attempt to get in touch with the rest of the Resistance, and since their role was as good as redundant now, the tracking network had been shut down, but she thought about Finn often, and never without a feeling of guilt. Maybe if all her hopes failed, she'd speak to him again.

Captain Ocram's intelligence informed General Hux's military plans, which she took to the alliance for ratification. The alliance's complaints and demands for action were considered by the military council to be accepted or dismissed as required. It worked. The system might be creaky and slow most of the time, and prone to argument, but the number of insurgencies had dropped dramatically and pretty much everyone had stopped shooting at each other.

There was always a spare seat at the council table, which continued to be held in the office next door to hers, and she found herself wondering, at regular intervals, what he would have done when faced with the same decisions. She could no longer sense him, and there had been no intelligence reports of nasally-challenged, black-suited men stabbing people with lightsabers. Or, if there were, Captain Ocram had suppressed them. She thought she'd probably be able to feel it if he'd died. This meant that somewhere out there, Ben was living his life without her, probably still seething with resentment, maybe even plotting revenge.

She preferred to plan for the future instead of dwelling on the past, but sometimes in the middle of the night, she'd wake from a particularly vivid dream and find her hands scrabbling at her cheeks, struggling to remove a mask that wasn't there.

And then one afternoon, halfway through the arrangements to break a trade blockade on Villengard, something shifted. She broke off from the conversation, glanced around the room curiously to see what had changed.

'Something wrong, Supreme Leader?' Hux asked her politely. He was the only one who still insisted on title rather than name.

'No, I …' she trailed off, having completely lost the thread of the discussion. 'I just …'

Something was different, but she couldn't place exactly what it was. She crooked an eyebrow at Captain Ocram, but he responded with a confused stare; sensitive as he might be to the Force, this change hadn't affected him.

'Carry on. You were talking about supply lines?' That was the last thing she could remember.

'I was just explaining,' the new, keen general, who was no longer so new, but still keen, and whose name was almost entirely unpronounceable, continued. 'That we need to station Destroyers here, here, and another here because ...'

She felt it again, and her head jerked up automatically as she strove to listen. It wasn't a call exactly, nothing as specific, but she had a sense that someone, somewhere, was speaking her name. She took a pace away from the conference table, tilting her head to try to hear it better.

'Supreme Leader?' Hux was trying to attract her attention. 'Supreme Leader?'

The words coming out of his mouth sounded so wrong for an instant, so unfamiliar, that she shook her head to bat them away, struggling to focus on whatever message she was so close to receiving. They were all staring at her now. She put a hand out to forestall any questions, indicating for silence while she listened.

There was something, a whisper in the stars, a murmur across the galaxy and it spoke her name.

'It's time,' she confirmed with a nod.

'Time, Rey?' Newly-promoted Captain Vanya shook her head. 'Time for what?'

Rey grinned, a wild and a fierce grin, and the old exhilaration awoke inside her, capered through her veins. 'It's time I was leaving. You don't need me anymore. You haven't for a while.'

'Supreme Leader?'

'No. You don't need a Supreme Leader. In fact, I'd advise all of you never to appoint another Supreme Leader again. And don't any of you try to take on the position yourselves. You'll find that throne very uncomfortable.'

'You're leaving?' Major Breen sounded concerned. 'We can't manage the alliance without you.'

'Of course, you can, it's self-supporting. The alliance makes sure the military doesn't turn into a tyranny, and the military makes sure the alliance takes action. You balance each other out. You're the Republic and the Empire in one, the best of both, and I'm very proud of you. But you don't need me anymore.'

Hux frowned, 'We need a leader.'

She smiled at him. 'What is the purpose of the First Order, General?'

He quoted it back at her, 'It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilisation may be returned to the stability that promotes progress.'

'Exactly. You've achieved all that already, and you know what? I'm a terrible leader, I never did have any idea what was supposed to come next. So it's over to you to find out. All of you together, the best of the dark side and the light. You're all Supreme Leaders now. The First Order is no more. You are the Second Order now. Good luck.'

'Where are you going?' Hux asked.

Her smile stretched even wider. 'Back to where I belong.'

'Jakku?'

She shrugged, turned her attention to Captain Ocram. 'Possibly. Do you know?'

He rolled a shoulder, self-deprecating. 'I might.'

She laughed, reached out, and squeezed his hand. 'Thank you, Menan. In the end, the pleasure was all mine.'

She had the black tunic off as soon as she was over the threshold of her own room, the trousers kicked away not long afterwards, and out of the wardrobe she selected her favourite item of clothing–a gift from the Jakku delegation, when they had come to join the alliance. They weren't quite her old clothes, but they made her feel like herself again.

She kept the leather boots though and the sword belt. After some thought, she also packed the Supreme Leader's dress, just in case anyone ever told her she was nothing again. Then she skipped down to the hangar to collect her command shuttle. It was the only one of its kind, the first light, long range craft to roll off the new First Order production line. It was also so white that if a stormtrooper stood in front of it, they disappeared.

A set of co-ordinates had already been plotted into the navigation system, and she fired the engines and blasted out of the hangar bay without a backwards look.

It was time to go home.


	26. Chapter 26

She really should have known where Ben had gone without Captain Ocram having to feed her the location, she decided, once she was circling the landing area. It was the obvious answer. Although he'd worn a mask for much of his tenure as homicidal megalomaniac-in-chief, he'd still be recognisable to many people who'd have a grudge against him. So he'd have to hide somewhere so remote it was only possible to find with a map, part of which was missing.

She set her pristine white ship down next to the battered old transport already parked, settled back in the chair, and let her mind relax. He was there in her head quicker than thought, that sense of him she'd missed for so long, but different to how she remembered in a quiet, subtle way.

He certainly wasn't angry, she could sense that about him, and he was somewhere up high. So with resignation, she exited the shuttle and began the trek through what was basically an island made of steps. There was the boulder she'd chopped in half, over there the washed-out firepit where she'd first felt that instant, powerful connection and known that she belonged, still further out the disturbingly buxom, mint-flavoured cows.

She found him in Luke's favourite spot, sitting on the rock she'd once sat on, staring out at the sunset. She approached hesitantly, unsure of her reception, and stopped level with him, so he'd have to look up to meet her gaze. He was thinner, but his skin had lost its sallow complexion, a legacy of spending so much time masked and indoors, and the scar had faded into a silvery spider thread down his cheek. His hair was almost long enough to need tying back, and in what was perhaps the biggest surprise of all, he'd changed his clothes. She squinted, trying to categorise the colour of his shirt. It might be midnight blue maybe, or phantom grey, but it was flapping loose from the close-fitting trousers he wore, and she could tell by the contrast that it wasn't black.

He sighed, still not looking up. 'It faded in the wash, alright? And you're still shouting.'

She cleared her throat. 'How have you been?'

He closed his eyes for a second. 'Angry. Then guilty. Remorseful. Angry again.' He shrugged. 'It comes and goes. You?'

There wasn't enough room to sit next to him, so she leaned her thigh against the stone base. 'I've been Supreme Leader. I've been stressed, over worked, under pressure, and lonely. Mostly lonely.'

'I imagine that's because you made me choose between killing you or leaving you.'

'That was for your own good. You needed some time on your own to decide who it is you want to be.'

A frown flickered across his face. 'You sound like my mother.'

'She asked me to look after you.'

He sucked in a deep breath, exhaled slowly through his mouth three times in quick succession, explaining, 'Jedi relaxation exercises. I almost don't feel like punching the floor when you mention her.'

'I heard you call,' she said. 'But I wasn't expecting to find you here.'

'There weren't many options in the end. After you threw me out, I landed on the first planet I came to, but you'd be amazed how recognisable the command shuttle is, especially with me inside it. The colonists all started bowing, and then they realised I was on my own, and they started blasting instead. I couldn't fight them all. I tried, but a few got lucky.'

The memory of pain shot through her awareness of him, pain and blood.

'The second place I came to wasn't so fussy, and I sold the shuttle. There were pictures of you all over the media channels sitting on a throne, pontificating about alliances, and I was slightly too… vocal about it. Someone recognised me. It's the voice apparently. I wasn't even wearing the mask. There was a fight. I had to leave in a hurry.'

Something had been broken that time, she sensed. He had taken time to heal, nursing his pain alone in the dark.

He sighed. 'Since then, I've just drifted from place to place. I don't belong anywhere anymore.'

She accepted that with a nod. 'Did you come here to see Luke?' She could already sense he wasn't on the island.

'I came here to kill Luke. After I'd asked him to explain what he meant about knowing when I'd finished my training. It's been annoying me.'

'Everything annoys you. Did you kill him?' She managed to ask the question as if she didn't care about the answer.

'No. He was already gone. Left me a lovely note about how to look after his cows though.'

'So why did you stay?'

'Have you tried their milk? It's worth staying anywhere for.'

'Seriously.'

His gesture took in most of the island in its sweep. 'This place, you told me about it, but I guess you have to be here to understand. It suits me. The light and the dark don't pull against each other here, they balance.'

'And have you found balance? Do you feel like you've changed?' She sounded pathetically hopeful, even to herself.

'You haven't.' His shoulders dropped, and he finally pivoted on the stone, tucking his legs up under his chin. 'You still expect too much. You always have.'

She perched in the space he'd vacated, close enough to touch, but not daring to.

There was another pause as he considered. 'Some of the things I've done, they're…' He wouldn't meet her gaze, searched the horizon for words instead. 'I don't expect anyone to forgive me for them. Anyone like you, for example.'

She knew better than to break the silence.

'And some of the things that other people did to me, I can't forgive either. Some decisions I took and some I was forced into taking. I get angry at it, at myself, at everything. It's not easy to find a way through.' He turned, tried his smile on her again and it was so sad and so lost she felt tears prickle the back of her eyes. 'On balance, I think I'd rather have been born to filthy junk traders on Jakku.'

She returned the smile and nudged his side with her shoulder. 'They'd only have sold you for drinking money.'

His smile faded, his attention wandered back to the sunset, and she could feel the distance between them growing although neither of them had moved.

'What happens now?' She was afraid of the answer.

He sighed. 'I can't be who you want me to be. I won't ever change enough to give you what you want. I can't undo any of the things I've done. I called because I thought I ought to tell you that in person.'

'The only thing I ever wanted from you was your loyalty and devotion. Particularly the devotion. I've missed it.'

His face filled with doubt. 'You've been too busy to miss me. I've been watching. Every system I went to, every planet I visited, you were there. I carried you with me everywhere I went. People talk about you. They like you. They like what you're doing.'

'I'm not doing it any more. I never wanted to be Supreme Leader. I never wanted to join the First Order. I only did it because you asked me to, and I wanted to help you. There was so much conflict inside you. I thought if I showed you an alternative way to live your life that might resolve it. I thought if I loved you enough, the anger might go away. But I realised that nobody changes for love, least of all me. I didn't handle it very well, what happened between us at the end, but I'm not a monster, Ben. I never wanted power. I only ever wanted you.'

'And I only ever wanted you to love me, exactly as I was, without trying to make me into somebody else. I didn't think that was too much to ask.'

She shrugged. 'I did. I still do. I'm not expecting you to change. I just want you to be the person you are with me, always. But this is your chance to choose who you want to be. You've had time to think about it. I brought a ship – you can go back to the Order if you like. There's still a place for you on the council, but you might not like some of the changes I've made - you won't be Supreme Leader any more. You can choose power. You can choose to rule. You can't undo the things you've done but you could make amends. Or you can choose to stay with me.'

'You're not going back?'

A smile pulled the corner of her mouth. 'Never. You told me I was nothing once, do you remember? Not important to anyone except you. Well now we're even. Neither of us has anything except each other. And that means we're free.'

He put out a hand, ran the knuckles gently down her cheek and she leaned into the caress.

'I know what Luke meant,' she declared suddenly, realising. 'I know how you know when your training's finished.'

His black eyes searched hers, and she felt the magnetic pull towards him reasserting itself.

'It's when you know, in your heart, that you're good enough.'

He pulled a face. 'I've never known how to be good enough.'

'You are already good enough for me. And I don't expect it to be easy, or quick, and I imagine that there will be some days when you kick the cat and I have to remind you not to be Lord of the Sith. But I think that if you want to, you can be a good enough husband and a good enough father, and a good enough man, not for me, but for yourself.'

She reached out, brushed his cheek, and let her mind fill with all the hopes and dreams she'd had for their future, which were both numerous and varied, since she'd spent every spare moment over the last six months thinking of and planning for little else. The bigger, faster command shuttle equipped for a crew of two who might want to spend long periods of time alone together, the maps in its databanks of systems in which the First Order was still unknown, the credits stashed in secure accounts, and the range of flamboyant, hand-picked wardrobe choices now available to him on board.

He always had another chance, she thought. She would always have given him that, but she still wasn't sure what his choice would be. She wasn't sure if he could let the past die, and become who he was meant to be - hers.

She raised her hand. 'Join me,' she said. 'Please.'

The connection between them was instant, and powerful and through it, she knew that she belonged, whether that was here on the island, or anywhere else that life might take them in the future.

He stretched out his hand slowly, so slowly, but his fingers avoided her grasp and cupped her face instead. 'I don't belong anywhere anymore,' he repeated. 'Except with you.'

Thank you to everyone who has read this story. If you'd like to read more, my romance novels The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available now on Amazon for about $3.


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